Why Did Zenith TVs Disappear? Here's What Happened To The Iconic American Brand

If you had an old CRT TV or home entertainment console or stereo, you might remember the brand Zenith (my family still has a Zenith "Allegro" record/8-track player we inherited from my great-grandmother). Along with RCA, Magnavox, Westinghouse, and others, Zenith was a household name in televisions and electronics back in the days when TVs were quite expensive and required multiple people to lift.

For some history, Zenith was first founded in 1918 as Chicago Radio Laboratory and eventually changed to Zenith Radio Corporation in 1923. True to its name, it started out making radios, but eventually revolutionized the television industry by inventing the remote control, first as a wired version in 1950 called the "Lazy Bones," then the ubiquitous wireless version launched in 1956 under the name "Space Command." 

So what happened to Zenith? The story, as unfortunate as it is, is not all that exciting. In 1999, it became wholly-owned subsidiary of LG Electronics, the company that makes fridges, appliances, TVs, and numerous other electronics.

What's more exciting, however, is what Zenith did for the television and broadcasting industry. It provided to infrastructure for the earliest forms of HD broadcasting all the way back in 1988 and made digital broadcasting possible in the olden days of analog, eventually allowing the full transition from analog TV broadcast signals to digital in 2008 and 2009.

In 2026, Zenith still exists under the ownership of LG Electronics. It just doesn't make televisions and what it specializes in isn't as visible as giant heavy TVs from the 1980s in the middle of your living room. It works primarily in the encryption of digital TV signals through a technology it calls Pro:Idiom. According to Zenith, the tech is used mostly in hotel televisions. So the next time you watch a marathon of "Impractical Jokers," "Dinners, Drive-Ins, and Dives," or "Shark Tank" in a hotel room, Zenith was behind the technology.