Televisionaries: Inside the Chaos and Innovation of the Digital Revolution

Televisionaries is the captivating inside story of the digital television revolution, featuring the engineers, entrepreneurs, and media titans who made it happen.

During the 1980s, conventional wisdom held that "Japan Inc." would become the leading economic power, with its new HDTV technology dominating the next generation of consumer electronics. In response, European countries funded a billion-dollar HDTV activity designed to keep the Japanese at bay. But both solutions had a fatal flaw - they were based on analog technology.

With the world's eyes diverted overseas, General Instrument (GI) harbored a secret project in its San Diego labs. The notion of transforming television from its analog roots to the zeros and ones of computers was deemed impossible at the time. Undaunted, GI boldly developed the world's first digital television system, upsetting the status quo on three continents. Digital TV soon became a reality for consumers throughout the world, and the media business was forever changed.