The technical foundation of television had been laid in the 1920s through John Logie Baird's mechanical scans and Vladimir Zworykin's electronic experiments; but the war years suspended development. In 1946–1947, American manufacturers like RCA, Philco, and DuMont brought commercial receivers back to market and prices fell quickly. Some 350,000 American households owned a television in 1948; by 1955 that figure was 30 million, and by the end of the decade it reached 45 million — nearly every home-owning family. In 1953 NBC inaugurated the RCA-developed NTSC color standard; the first major live color broadcast was the Tournament of Roses Parade on 1 January 1954. Europe produced its own standards: PAL (West Germany, 1963) and SECAM (France, 1967). Regular television broadcasting in Turkey would not begin until 1968 with TRT — a lag behind continental Europe, but by the late 1950s Turkish citizens near the borders were already picking up signals from neighbouring countries.

Programme formats began as inheritances from radio but diverged quickly. Variety shows (The Ed Sullivan Show, 1948–1971), situation comedies (I Love Lucy, 1951–1957 — a single episode of which was watched by more than 50 million people, a third of the US population), Westerns (Gunsmoke, 1955–1975), live drama (Playhouse 90), children's programmes (The Mickey Mouse Club, 1955–1959), and news (the CBS Evening News, the NBC Nightly News). The advertising model was new: a single sponsor would buy an entire hour — 'Texaco Star Theater', 'Kraft Television Theatre' — and the brand became part of the title. The 1948 Paramount Pictures decision prohibited the eight major Hollywood studios from owning the cinemas in which their films played; the studio system collapsed, and the vacuum left was filled by television. In 1953 Lucille Ball's pregnancy was written into the show — though the word 'pregnant' still could not be used on air — and a record audience watched the birth episode the night before Eisenhower's inauguration. Entertainment had reached a new scale.

Television's relationship to politics was one of the deepest cultural shifts of the 1950s. On 9 March 1954, on CBS's See It Now, Edward R. Murrow confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunt by using montages of McCarthy's own speeches against him — and the Senate's censure of McCarthy that same year is widely treated as a direct consequence. On the evening of 26 September 1960 the first televised US presidential debate took place: 70 million Americans watched Richard Nixon sweat on camera, saw his five o'clock shadow, and registered John F. Kennedy's calm, tanned composure. Radio listeners thought Nixon had won; television viewers thought Kennedy had. Historians treat this evening as the beginning of modern media politics. In the same years the Soviet Union institutionalised television as an instrument of propaganda; but its one-way centralised model produced a different terrain from the West's advertiser-funded, competitive one.

Television was not merely a new piece of furniture but a new way the world was perceived. By the end of the 1950s American children were watching more than 25 hours of television per week — more than they spent in school. Dinner shifted to fit the schedule; the family living room was rearranged around chairs facing the screen. Stories entering millions of homes simultaneously produced a national shared experience: when Apollo 11 landed in 1969, an estimated 600 million people worldwide were bound to the same minutes. No medium had ever achieved that scale. The downside was equally large: the homogenisation of local culture, concerns about child development (in 1961 FCC chairman Newton Minow called television a 'vast wasteland'), and the turn of advertising toward the subconscious. Cable in the 1990s, the internet in the 2000s, and streaming in the 2010s broke television's monopoly; but the 1950s' core achievement — shared content watched at the same time on a global scale — was inherited by every era that followed. Television was the last great one-way medium of mass communication.