7. Portable TV And DVD

While audio devices have always been popular, portable video players and televisions have had a convoluted history, with many false starts along the way. Portable TVs were an early arrival, often hooked up to car batteries or used in RVs. Small screen CRTs meant that devices could be small enough to carry.

In 1956 Emerson called this a 'TV for every room'

Clive Sinclair's Sinclair Research released their first pocket TV in 1978, though the tiny CRT used made pictures very hard to see. A year before, Hitachi had demonstrated the future of the pocket TV with a prototype LCD display, though it would be another 5 years before Casio's TV-10 would bring LCD TV to the masses. In the meantime, both Sony and Sinclair experimented with flat CRTs. The first color LCD came from Epson in 1984, and the CRT was soon left behind for portable screens. Advances in LCD technology have improved display quality and increased image sizes. The current generation of portable TVs support terrestrial digital signals, as well as video-out signals from pocket media players.

A short lived alternative was the TV watch, which took the Dick Tracy-approach (and hid the tuner in your pocket). Seiko launched their first TV Watch in 1984, and it's since become a collector's item. Other TV watches have been released since then, and current models have built-in tuners.

The two main problems for portable TV are reception and the size of the antenna, so portable DVD players have become more popular. Initial systems arrived at the end of 2000, with Panasonic launching its first device. Like CD players before them, portable DVD players have become a transition technology between optical media and hard disk and flash-based portable media players, with users able to use commercial codecs to burn their own media content. Many current devices now support the popular DIVX digital media codec.