CCTV takes numerous forms and performs functions ranging from image enhancement for the partially sighted to the transmission of pay-per-view sports broadcasts. Although cable television is technically a form of CCTV, the term is generally used to designate TV systems with more specialized applications than broadcast or cable television. In the United States, these specialized systems are not subject to regulation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), although CCTV systems using scrambled radio waves are subject to common carrier tariffs and FCC conditions of service.

CCTV has many industrial and scientific applications, including electron microscopy, medical imaging, and robotics, but the term “closed-circuit TV” refers most often to security- and surveillance-camera systems. Other common forms of CCTV include live, on-site video displays for special events (e.g., conventions, arena sports, rock concerts); pay-per-view telecasts of sporting events such as championship boxing matches; and “in-house” television channels in hospitals, airports, racetracks, schools, malls, grocery stores, and municipal buildings.

The conception of many of these uses of CCTV technology dates back to the earliest years of television. In the 1930s and 1940s, writers such as New York Times columnist Orrin Dunlap predicted that closed-circuit TV systems would enhance industry, education, science, and commerce. Dunlap and other writers envisioned CCTV systems for supervising factory workers and for visually coordinating production in different areas of a factory, and they anticipated CCTV systems replacing pneumatic tubes in office communications. In the world of science, closed-circuit television was heralded as a way of viewing dangerous experiments as they took place; in the sphere of education, CCTV was seen as a way of bringing lessons simultaneously to different groups of students in a school or university.

Many of today’s CCTV systems were first implemented in the years following World War II. For example, pay-per-view closed-circuit sports broadcasts can be traced back to a postwar Hollywood invention known as “theater television,” a CCTV system used for viewing sports in movie theaters that became a lucrative source of ancillary revenue for boxing promoters in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. With the growth of cable television and satellite delivery systems, CCTV telecasts have become an integral part of the business of sports today, not only in the boxing industry but also in horseracing, baseball, and golf.

Educational TV and video advertising in retail stores are other CCTV applications that originated in the post–World War II period. The controversial Channel One News, a commercial CCTV news program for schools founded in the 1980s, is only the latest of several CCTV experiments in education dating back to the 1950s. Today’s “on-site” media industry, which places video advertising monitors in grocery stores, shopping malls, and other retail sites, dates back to a series of tests involving closed-circuit advertising in department stores that took place in the 1940s.

Although all of these applications of CCTV are fairly common, perhaps the most pervasive use of CCTV is for surveillance. Security cameras are now a ubiquitous feature of many institutions and places, from the corrections facility to the convenience store, from the traffic stop to the Super Bowl. In prisons, CCTV systems reduce the costs of staffing and operating observation towers and make it possible to maintain a constant watch on all areas of the facility. CCTV is also used as a means of monitoring performance in the workplace; in 1992, according to an article in Personnel Journal, there were 10 million employees in the United States whose work was monitored via electronic security systems. Retail stores often install CCTV cameras as a safeguard against theft and robbery, a practice that municipal authorities have adopted as a way of curtailing crime in public housing and even on city streets. In the United Kingdom and United States, for example, police in several cities have installed closed-circuit cameras in busy public areas. Similar measures are taken to deter or detect terrorist attacks at major sporting events and other crowded gatherings.

These uses of CCTV technology are not neutral; indeed, they are often a matter of some controversy. These controversies center on the status of legal evidence acquired via closed-circuit TV and on the Orwellian implications of constant perceived surveillance. Police use of CCTV security cameras has led to charges of civil liberties violations. A 1978 survey on the topic of CCTV in the workplace found that 77 percent of employers interviewed supported the use of CCTV on the job. However, it also found that a majority of employees felt that CCTV in the workplace constituted an unwarranted intrusion and favored the passage of laws prohibiting such surveillance. The ascendancy of other sophisticated electronic employee surveillance technologies, such as keystroke monitoring of information workers, can sometimes render CCTV somewhat less important as a visual management technology.

In addition to these civil liberties issues, another controversy surrounding security cameras concerns their effectiveness in crime prevention. The purpose of CCTV surveillance is usually deterrence of, rather than intervention in, criminal acts. Many security cameras go unmonitored and are thus ineffective as a means of halting crimes in progress. This fact was forcefully demonstrated by a highly publicized juvenile murder case in England in 1992. After the discovery of the victim’s body and the apprehension of the perpetrators, police discovered that the initial abduction had been recorded by a shopping center’s security cameras.

Another controversy surrounding CCTV is its use in the courtroom. In 1985 the state of California passed a law allowing children to testify via CCTV in child molestation cases. In response to a similar ruling, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that this method of testimony was unconstitutional, as it violated a defendant’s right to confront his or her accuser.

Although this particular case reflects a concern that the camera can somehow “lie” and that it is not equivalent to face-to-face interaction, the latest trends in CCTV applications seem to rely precisely on the equation of closed-circuit television with actual presence. New technological developments that seem to base themselves on this premise include “teleconferencing,” an audiovisual communications form designed to allow individuals in different places to interact via CCTV hookups, and “virtual reality,” imaging systems that use CCTV “goggles” in conjunction with advanced computer graphics and input devices to create the illusion of a three-dimensional, interactive environment for the viewer.