Remember the TV spot in which a woman, so impressed with her Fabergé shampoo, proclaims: "You'll tell two friends. (split screen) And they'll tell two friends (quad screen). And so on. (16 boxes) And so on. (24 boxes) And so on."
Besides being an analog-age notion of viral marketing, the commercial's use of splitting the screen into ever smaller boxes was dead-on regarding the shape of things to come — without the split ends, of course. Back then, though, by the time you lost count of the number of friends she told, you couldn't see much detail in each of those tiny boxes. The TV was too small, and high definition was decades away.
Still, broadcasters have been tinkering with putting more than one thing on the screen at once since the 1950s. Do you recall George Burns using a closed-circuit TV in his man cave to spy on Gracie Allen in another room so he could comment directly to the audience? The Burns and Allen Show (1950-58) may have been the first example of picture-in-picture.
There are just a few degrees of separation between the kids' show Winky Dink and You (1953-57) and CNBC's Decabox (introduced in 2008). In Winky Dink, the granddaddy of interactive programming, children sent away for a kit containing a plastic overlay they stuck to the screen with static electricity. When an animated character needed help, viewers were asked to draw on the screen. The program was hosted by Jack Barry, who went on to host Tic-Tac-Dough (1956-59), a quiz show in which contestants who answered correctly placed their X or O on the board.
The tick-tack-toe game format led to another quiz show, Hollywood Squares (1965-82). Wisecrackers like Paul Lynde and Rose Marie were stacked atop one another in nine boxes arranged 3-by-3 in a large square set, answering questions. The geometry was well-suited for the 4:3 TVs of the time. By 2008, however, the top row of celebrities would have had to have been cropped off at their necks to fit into the wider but not as tall 16:9 screens of HDTV. This is why, with the financial collapse in 2008, CNBC inserted 10 talking heads on the screen arranged five wide by two high. Behold the Decabox, which replaced the Octabox.
Jon Stewart on The Daily Show could hardly contain himself: "What if eight pundits isn't enough? What if the enormity of this economic collapse is so huge that even eight of the financial industry's smallest-headed people can't figure it out?"
Another financial news channel started the trend of subdividing the screen. In the mid-'90s, Bloomberg Information TV split the screen into some six parcels containing financial indexes, sports scores, weather forecasts, the day and date, and a talking head complete with his own graphic inset behind him. About the same time, the networks began running end-of-program credits along the side of the screen while reserving the majority of the display to promote other shows. If you were viewing each of these examples on a 19-inch TV, then still common, you might be prone to pull out a magnifying glass.
HDTV resolution and the trend to large displays catapulted little boxes into the big time, or to bastardize certain folk song lyrics co-opted by the Showtime series,Weeds, "Little boxes on the boob tube. Little boxes all the same." Rather than being all made out of ticky tacky, though, they were all made out of pixels.
Here's the thing about pixels: the more, the merrier, but the greater potential for abuse. While a Full HD screen enables a programmer to divvy up 2 million pixels, the new Ultra HD or "4K" TVs empower a pallet of 8,294,400 pixels.
Do the math. How many little boxes each measuring 64-by-64 pixels can you carve out of a 4K display? If you said 2,025, you'd be right. That's more than enough to accommodate every head who has a seat on the New York Stock Exchange — all 1,366 of them. Please don't pontificate all at once.
With more than 2,000 video windows open simultaneously, every player on each of the NFL's 32 teams and their potential replacements could be peering live at viewers as the First Draft picks are announced. Please don't get any ideas, ESPN!
A 4K system means that when the president gives a State of the Union Address, each member of Congress can have his or her own camera focused exclusively on them. Every grimace, each nodding off, any finger in a nose would be available for public viewing in sync with the president's own words. Are Americans prepared for such utter transparency?
When it comes to cluttering up the TV screen, you haven't seen anything yet.
