On-screen display

Some of the first OSD-equipped televisions were introduced by RCA in the late 1970s, simply displaying the channel number and the time of day at the bottom of the screen.

The original OSD was merely to placate users who were faced with a snowy screen during auto tuning.

Many PAL television sets use the internal Teletext decoder's graphics rendering system to further reduce costs.

[citation needed] Akai produced consumer video cassette recorders (VCR) during the 1980s.

The Akai VS-2 was the first VCR with an on-screen display, originally named the Interactive Monitor System.

By displaying the information directly on the television screen, this innovation eliminated the need for the user to be physically near the VCR to program recording, read the tape counter, or perform other common features.

Some computer software also uses OSDs, especially support programs for so-called "enhanced keyboards", which often had additional medias like skipping through music tracks and volume adjustment.

The drawbacks of using OSDs do not outweigh their main advantage of being more cost-efficient and allowing to design less separate physical tuning controls, which has led to their widespread use.