Large-screen television technology (colloquially big-screen TV) developed rapidly in the late 1990s and 2000s. Prior to the development of thin-screen technologies, rear-projection television was standard for larger displays, and jumbotron, a non-projection video display technology, was used at stadiums and concerts. Various thin-screen technologies are being developed, but only liquid crystal display (LCD), plasma display (PDP) and Digital Light Processing (DLP) have been publicly released. Recent technologies like organic light-emitting diode (OLED) as well as not-yet-released technologies like surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) or field emission display (FED) are in development to replace earlier flat-screen technologies in picture quality.

Large-screen technologies have almost completely displaced cathode-ray tubes (CRT) in television sales due to the necessary bulkiness of cathode-ray tubes. The diagonal screen size of a CRT television is limited to about 100 cm (40 in) because of size requirements of the cathode-ray tube, which fires three beams of electrons onto the screen to create a viewable image. A large-screen TV requires a longer tube, making a large-screen CRT TV of about 130 to 200 cm (50 to 80 in) unrealistic. Newer large-screen televisions are comparably thinner.