Jerusalem Sessions Festival marks 100 years of Israel's thriving TV industry

As one of the attractions to celebrate television's 100th birthday, Jerusalem Sessions will be setting up a free, open-to-the-public living room at the National Library of Israel from November 17-19, where visitors can drop in and watch whatever happens to be on, the way people did before streaming.“The thing about television is that you watch it at home,” said Daniel Susz, the festival's director, who admitted he was skeptical about a TV festival at first. “It's a private medium. It's an intimate thing. You watch it in your pajamas.” He pointed out that a festival is the opposite: “Culture is about community.”A brief historyIt all began on October 2, 1925, when, in his cramped Soho workshop, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird made a ventriloquist's dummy named Stooky Bill, television's first “star.” On January 26, 1926, he demonstrated his invention publicly in London.In 1927, 21-year-old Utah farm boy Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first fully electronic image: a single straight line. After World War II, TV spread into living rooms across America and then the world.Cable arrived in 1948 and carried network signals over the hills of Pennsylvania and Oregon. Then came HBO in 1972, CNN in 1980, and MTV in 1981. Today, streaming has erased borders.