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| 1988 |  Chronomedia indexNumbers after entries link to the list of references. |
links and notes |
| Cultural highlights | Predictions made this year | ||
| January 1 | Soviet jamming of BBC broadcasts in Polish ceases. | |
| January | Launch date for CD-i slips to early-to-mid-1989. | > December |
| January | Matsushita manufactures prototype CD-i. | |
| January | Warner New Media launches the CD Plus Graphics (CD+G) format in the USA. | |
| January | Following frequent complaints from British parents that children are staying away from school to watch Australian soap Neighbours, being shown daily on daytime television, the BBC moves the programme to 17:35, repeated the following lunchtime. It attracts audiences of around 16m and several episodes are regularly in each week's top 10 ratings. | |
| February | Sony and Philips announce specifications for a rewritable CD system. | |
| March | Pioneer launches a Laser Disc player that can play both sides of disc without turning it. | |
| March | US firm Optical Data Corporation releases The Voyager Gallery, first consumer video disc to come with computer disk and Apple Hypercard stack. | |
| March | LaserVision Association of the Pacific—including Philips, Pioneer and Sony—drops the name LaserVision and agrees to call it Laser Disc. | |
| March | Matsushita, Sanyo and Sharp drop JVC’s VHD video disc system in favour of the Laser Disc format. | |
| April | Jordan opens a new broadcasting complex on the site of an ancient fortress at Qasr Kherane in the Jordanian desert. It is the world's first multi-frequency broadcasting station with long-, medium- and short-wave transmitters on the same site, including the most powerful short-wave transmitter arrangement. [0054] | |
| May 16 | Broadcasting Standards Council is appointed by UK Home Secretary. | |
| May | Film Finance Corporation is established in Australia by federal government. Producers who raise 30 per cent of production finance from private sources can apply for loans to make up the balance of the investment. | |
| May | Sony launches the first consumer laser disc/compact disc combi-player on the US market. | |
| May | International Standards Organisation (ISO) convenes the first meeting of the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) to create a standard for digital video encoding. | |
| June 8 | Rupert Murdoch announces the launch of Sky Television as a four-channel advertising-supported service to be transmitted via the forthcoming first Astra satellite. The service will include a revamped Sky Channel, plus one channel each devoted to movies, news and sport. | |
| July 15 | MTV Internacional pop music channel created for Hispanic US and Latin America. | |
| July 28 | UK government announces that up to four services will be licensed to provide Telepoint services, by means of which consumers will be able to connect to public telephone networks via digital cordless handsets (known as CT2, for second-generation cordless telephony) when they are within range of a base station. | Forerunner of Wi-Fi > September 22 |
| August | MIT Media Lab demonstrates a compression system for one hour of video on CD using an Apple Macintosh II computer. The project's backers include Paramount, Warner and Columbia Pictures. | |
| September 19 | First Israeli satellite, Offek 1, is launched. | |
| September 22 | UK government invites applications for licences to provide Telepoint services. | > 1989 January 26 |
| September | Polygram officially launches the CD-Video format. | |
| September | Philips and Pioneer launch PAL CD Video players in Europe. | |
| October 3 | TNT (Turner Network Television) launched in US with 17m homes subscribing—largest number for any cable channel launch to date. First programme: cable exclusive screening of Gone with the Wind (7.4 rating, 4.5m homes watching), appropriately set in TNT's home city of Atlanta, Georgia. | > 1994 April 14 |
| October 3 | All ITV television broadcasters in the UK are now transmitting round the clock. | |
| October | UK firm Nimbus Records announces a high density CD format with up to four times the storage capacity of conventional discs. | |
| November 1 | British Film Institute chooses this day for 18,000 viewers to participate in compiling a record of One Day in the Life of Television. A book is subsequently published. | |
| November | Philips and Sony announce the 9cm/3.5-inch mini-CD format for 'singles'. | |
| November | Japanese recording media specialist company Taiyo Yuden launches write-once recordable CDs. | |
| December 11 | Luxembourg-based Société Européenne des Satellites (SES) launches its Astra 1A satellite. | |
| December 12 | SIS satellite television horse-racing service begins transmissions to UK betting shops. | |
| December 16 | The piano played by ‘Sam’ (Dooley Wilson) in the Paris scene from Casablanca (1942) sells at Sotheby’s New York auction rooms for $154,000. | |
| • | Orson Welles’ annotated script for his radio production of War of the Worlds sells at auction for $143,000. | > 1989 June |
| December | Philips Interactive Media America announces that the launch of a consumer CD-i player has been put back again to first quarter 1991. | |
| December | Sony launches the first PAL/NTSC dual-standard laser disc player, aimed at the professional market. | |
| • | Brent Walker Entertainment Group acquires Cannon Studios (formerly BIP/ABPC/EMI) at Elstree. | |
| • | US Congress passes the National Film Preservation Act. A United States National Film Preservation Board is empowered to add 25 films each year to the National Film Registry for preservation in the Library of Congress. Any American films more than five years old can be nominated, regardless of length or releases history. | > 1992 |
Page updated 27 May 2009
© David Fisher