Anniversary in Berlin

100 years of IFA: a look back at the tops and flops

Archive image: Television and the technology it requires - pictured: flexible OLED televisions from LG - have been a topic at IFA since the 1930s.

(Bild: REUTERS)

The Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin is celebrating its centenary this year - and wants to reinvent itself with a stronger focus on a young audience. We take the upcoming start of the trade fair on Friday as an opportunity to look back at the tops and flops from a hundred years.

The premiere of color television in Germany on August 25, 1967 began with a mishap. The then German Vice-Chancellor Willy Brandt had come to the International Consumer Electronics Fair (IFA) under the Berlin Radio Tower to launch the new TV era in front of the cameras with a big red button.

But the button was only a dummy, as it turned out shortly afterwards. When the SPD politician - who had just been seen in black and white - ceremoniously pressed the button at 10.57 a.m., it was already too late. The transmitted television picture was already in color. A nervous technician backstage had probably activated the color TV a few seconds too early.

NTSC versus PAL
However, the launch of color television was not a real world first. After all, some television viewers in the USA had already been able to receive color TV pictures since the mid-1950s - albeit in the much poorer quality NTSC standard.

Germany opted for the PAL standard developed by Walter Bruch at Telefunken, which became established in Western Europe, Australia and a number of countries in South America, Africa and Asia after its IFA premiere. In the GDR, however, PAL technology from West Germany was not used because the entire Eastern Bloc had opted for the French SECAM system.

The IFA has been back at the Berlin Exhibition Grounds since 1971 - it was suspended during the Second World War and became a traveling exhibition in the 1950s.

(Bild: AFP/APA/John MACDOUGALL)

In the beginning, it wasn't about television
At the beginning of the radio exhibition in Berlin in 1924, it wasn't about television - that didn't come until seven years later. At first, radio receivers were in the spotlight. The slogan of the early radio pioneers was: "From mouth to ear on the beam of electric power!" What had been dismissed a few years earlier as a vague idea by oddball hobbyists quickly showed the prospect of a growth industry. Radio manufacturers such as Braun, Grundig, ITT Schaub Lorenz, Körting, Loewe, Nordmende, Saba and Telefunken did good business for decades after their modest beginnings, and not only in Germany.

The Funkausstellung has had a firm place in the history of television since 1931. At that time, TV pioneer and scientist Manfred von Ardenne presented the first fully electronic television, which was to determine the future of TV for a long time to come. In 1935, the German Reich Broadcasting Corporation launched the world's first public television program service.

Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a VE 301 Dyn people's receiver demonstrated to him at the 1938 Radio Exhibition. The propaganda radio was popularly known as the "Goebbels Schnauze".

(Bild: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H10252 / Autor/-in unbekannt / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

"Goebbels Schnauze": Nazis used IFA for propaganda
After the National Socialists seized power, the Funkausstellung was increasingly instrumentalized for political purposes. Technical innovations such as the "People's Receiver VE 301" presented at the 1933 Funkausstellung were personally commissioned by Reich propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and served as an important propaganda tool for the regime. "Goebbels Schnauze" was a radio set with only two programs.

With the invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the radio exhibition came to a temporary end and was not to be restarted until 1950 as a traveling exhibition with stops in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Berlin and Stuttgart. In 1971, the exhibition returned permanently to the grounds under the Berlin Radio Tower as the "Internationale Funkausstellung" (IFA).

The compact disc was unveiled at IFA in the early 1980s.

(Bild: BillionPhotos.com - stock.adobe.com)

More and more exhibitors from Asia came to Berlin
The new international claim in the trade fair name was underlined in the coming years, above all by the growing presence of foreign exhibitors - especially from Asia. And they provided some highlights: the compact disc (CD) was presented to a wide audience for the first time at IFA 1981.

The innovation had been developed by the Dutch Philips Group together with the Japanese electronics giant Sony. The compact disc revolutionized the music industry and ushered in the transition from analogue to digital technology.

Two years later, at the IFA 1983, the first digital televisions were presented. At the same time, 3D television was also shown for the first time as an experiment. While the digital system has since become established across the board, three-dimensional TV has remained a niche application.

TV resolution continued to rise
By contrast, televisions with high resolution (HD), which were shown at IFA from 1985 onwards, were very popular. The ever-increasing resolution of screens - from HD to FullHD to 4K to 8K - has been a recurring theme throughout the history of IFA ever since, even if not every intermediate standard presented in Berlin, such as D2-MAC, has caught on.

In the 1990s, however, the German trade fair missed out on an important technology trend: mobile communications. The first two digital mobile networks in Germany and the first mass-produced cell phone from Nokia were presented in 1992 - but not at IFA, as there was no radio exhibition that year.

The South Korean TV giants Samsung and LG in particular have been touting 8K televisions for several years now. However, there is still hardly any such sharp content.

(Bild: Dominik Erlinger)

It was not until 2005 that the trade fair switched to an annual rhythm. By then, however, it was already too late to compete with mobile trade fairs such as the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Deutsche Telekom, once the main tenant of Hall 21, now concentrates on its own DigitalX event in Cologne.

In recent years, trend topics have been missed
In recent years, IFA has also failed to pick up on trend topics such as electromobility or autonomous driving, as its US competitor CES in Las Vegas has done.

In contrast, IFA's strategic decision at the end of the 2000s to not only exhibit classic consumer electronics, but also to include household appliances - from dishwashers and fully automatic coffee machines to cleaning robots - in its program, was a success.

While the CES in the USA has turned into half a car show, where e-mobility (pictured: an electric car from Sony and Honda) is a major topic, the IFA has somewhat overslept the issue.

(Bild: Stephan Schätzl)

In order not to miss the boat again, the IFA organizer has decided to focus intensively on trend topics such as artificial intelligence. AI is not only omnipresent on computer screens, but also controls many consumer electronics and household appliances.