[8] It was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984[2] as a technology conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982.

[14] TED events are also held throughout North America and in Europe, Asia, and Africa, offering live streaming of the talks.

[19] In October , TED Talks' combined viewing figures surpassed 500 million,[20] and by November 2012, they had been watched over one billion times worldwide.

[21] While the talks are available free online, sharing TED content in commercial contexts (such as corporate learning and talent development) requires a license.

[22] TED was conceived in 1984 by Richard Saul Wurman, FAIA '76, [23] and co-founded by Emmy-winning broadcast and graphic designer Harry Marks and CBS President Emeritus Frank Stanton.

The conference featured demos of the compact disc, co-developed by Philips and Sony, and one of the first demonstrations of the Apple Macintosh computer.

From 1990 onward, a growing community of "TEDsters" gathered annually with Wurman leading the conference in Monterey until 2009,[26] when it was moved to Long Beach, California due to a substantial increase in the number of those attending.

[27][28] Speakers were initially drawn from the fields of expertise behind the acronym TED; but during the 1990s, presenters broadened to include scientists, philosophers, musicians, religious leaders, philanthropists, and many others.

[25] In 2000, Wurman, looking for a successor at age 65, met with new-media entrepreneur and TED enthusiast Chris Anderson to discuss future happenings.

In November 2001, Anderson's non-profit The Sapling Foundation (motto: "fostering the spread of great ideas")[1] acquired TED from Future for £6m.

There was criticism after Marvin Rees, Mayor of Bristol, flew 9,200 miles (14,800 km) to speak about climate change and the need for reduced carbon emissions.

On the basis of that success, the organization pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into its video production operations and the development of a website to feature about 100 of the talks.

When we first put up a few of the talks as an experiment, we got such impassioned responses that we decided to flip the organization on its head and think of ourselves not so much as a conference but as "ideas worth spreading," building a big website around it.

The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world.In March 2012, Netflix announced a deal to stream an initial series of 16 two-hour collections of TED Talks on similar subjects.

It intends to "[reach] out to the 4.5 billion people on the planet who don't speak English", according to TED Curator Chris Anderson.

[84] Members have several tools dedicated to knowledge management, such as the OTP Wiki OTPedia, Facebook groups, or video tutorials.

Current advisers for TED-Ed lessons include Aaron Sams, Jackie Bezos, John Hunter, Jonathan Bergmann, Melinda French Gates, and Sal Khan.

Season Four began in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic as a live-stream broadcast co-hosted by Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers and often offered listeners the opportunity to submit questions to the speaker.

[167] Established in 2010, TEDWomen features speakers focused on women-oriented themes, including gender issues and reproductive health.

Past speakers include former president Jimmy Carter,[171] Hillary Clinton,[172] Sheryl Sandberg,[173] Madeleine Albright,[174] Nancy Pelosi,[175] and Halla Tómasdóttir.

[196] Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek and TechCrunch wrote in 2010 that TED attendees complained of elitism from a "hierarchy of parties throughout the LA area with strict lists and security" after the sessions.

[198][199] Also in 2010, statistician Nassim Taleb called TED a "monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers".

He claimed TED curators did not initially post his talk "warning about the financial crisis" on their site on purely cosmetic grounds.

[200] In May 2012, venture capitalist Nick Hanauer spoke at TED University, challenging the belief that top income earners in America were the engines of job creation.

TED is nonpartisan and is fighting a constant battle with TEDx organizers to respect that principle...Nick, I personally share your disgust at the growth in inequality in the US, and would love to have found a way to give people a clearer mindset on the issue, without stoking a tedious partisan rehash of all the arguments we hear every day in the mainstream media.Alas, my judgement is that publishing your talk would not meet that goal.

The National Journal reported that Anderson considered Hanauer's talk one of the most politically controversial they had produced, and they needed to be careful about when they posted it.

Wired and the Harvard Business Review suggested that this lack of quality control in TEDx talks damaged the broader TED brand.

[212][94] According to professor Benjamin Bratton at University of California, San Diego, TED Talks' efforts at fostering progress in socio-economics, science, philosophy and technology have been ineffective.

[213] Chris Anderson responded that some critics misunderstood TED's goals, failing to recognise that it aimed to instill excitement in audiences in the same ways speakers felt it.

Episode 08, season 20 of the animated TV series Family Guy features a cutaway scene of Peter Griffin giving a TED talk about birthdays.