At least one major cable news network will often show a main event with someone providing their “professional opinion” from inside a small box, a mini screen within a larger screen. Perhaps today this is no big deal with everything PC-controlled. On the other hand, how did they create the 9-block screen for the “Brady Bunch” sit-com opening using late 1960’s / early 1970’s technology? Maybe it was by “brute force” literally using nine individual TV monitors placed close together and then shot with one camera?
Fast analog switches.
If you can control a switch fast enough, you can switch different synchronized video streams in and out in realtime. NTSC isn’t actually very fast - the dot clock is around 8 MHz.
Side question: When I was a kid, I remembered that all I wanted was a big TV where you can have picture in picture, basically watch 2 channels at once. Since becoming an adult, I’ve noticed that such a feature was less and less likely to be shown, maybe its almost gone entirely. Yet the technology must make such a thing easier and cheaper.
My current Vizio that I bought about 5 or 8 years ago does not have that capability and I haven’t shopped for a TV since then or kept up with the technology. Whatever happened to this being a standard feature of big TVs?
PiP has been almost entirely digital from the start. The first digital framestore devices were being developed in the early to mid-70s.
According to the wiki article, the first electronically created picture-in-picture broadcast was done with a Quantel framestore in 1976 for the opening of the Montreal Olympics.
FWIW, the Brady Bunch was filmed, not taped, so the 9-box would be a relatively easy thing to composite optically. That opening sequence was developed and shot by Howard A. Anderson, Jr., who also did titles for hundreds of other shows and movies.
No idea why PiP as an option for TV sets fizzled. Best guess is needing two sources, which for most people probably meant having to pay for two cable boxes.
I had a Magnavox TV as a teen in the 90s that had PIP. It wasn’t very large and not expensive. I certainly didn’t need 2 sources to get it to work. Granted, I only got video and no audio in the smaller picture but it worked. I don’t see why this should be such a difficult thing to include in a modern set.
It had two tuners.
With today’s digital cable boxes, getting two different video streams is not nearly as straightforward. On a smart TV, it would certainly be trivial to have Youtube playing in PIP, and Cable on the main screen - it would just be software. The problem seems to be one of demand, and the fact that smart TV software is perpetually half-baked.
Split screen was tricky - I recall some discussion of this, and one of the “fun” pieces of the technology was ensuring the horizontal and vertical scan signals were in sync - essentially both cameras fed from one sync signal source.
As for Marcia, Alice, et al - camera tricks (film, not video) were a LOT simpler. To get 9 simultaneous moving pictures, you filmed actor 1 - then exposed his picture focused on the top right, masking off the rest of the frame, one frame of the movie film at a time. Rewind the exposed film, repeat with the middle left area; and so on, for 9 spate exposures of the film.
Multiple exposures and masking was an old trick. Movies like the original Parent Trap, for example, had sequences where Haley Mills had a conversation with herself. There was usually a vertical diving line, like the edge of a door frame. The film was shot with one half masked and the action on the other half. Then the mask was switched, and the film re-exposed with the other side masked and the corresponding action.
The reason you don’t see PIP much anymore is because it’s a useless feature. More specifically, it looked ‘amazing’ in store showrooms and in ads for TVs in the 80s & 90s etc., but in reality once they got it home almost nobody ever used it. Because nobody wants to watch two channels simultaneously, anymore than you’d listen to two channels simultaneously. I know that watching two screens isn’t quite as maddening as listening to them at the same time, but still what good is it? That rare time when two important sports games are on at the same time?! DirecTV has sports packages that offer simultaneous multi-game PIP channels, and they’re nothing more than gimmicky eye candy.
Yeah, honestly I almost never used PIP when I had it. In theory it could be handy if I wanted to swap to the news while commercials were running during a show I was watching and I could keep an eye on the other channel and swap back when the commercials were over. But it was more trouble than it was worth. Now with DVRs and watching things on demand even that feature isn’t applicable.
Some television programs do this kind of thing automatically now… News programs have a stock ticker running at the bottom of the screen or give headlines to upcoming news stories. Sports matches will show stats for concurrently-running games or remind you of the results of recently-completed games, or they will quickly show highlights from other games when the current game is having a break. So this technology is somewhat redundant. Our DVR/cable box also has some of these kinds of features built-in too; hit one button and it pops up sports stats, hit the button again and they go away.
I guess PIP never really took off and has been replaced by similar but more flexible technologies so there’s just no need.