I pretty much never watch TV, and when I did I almost never watched the news, but it's interesting to check in once in a while - it mostly looks like it always did (hey, some places haven't even gone entirely to virtual sets or robotic cameras! wow!) but a really fascinating change vs. 20, 30 years ago is the fading use of chromakey
in 1995, and probably even in 1987, it was pretty much guaranteed that your local weatherman was pointing at High Pressure Zones on a map that only existed on a computer. once upon a time it made sense to make huge maps with, I don't know, stick on numbers or something to illustrate the weather, so the presenter could physically point at it, but with the introduction of keying it became a lot cheaper and more effective to just put a blue screen behind them.
That had its problems though. you can't point accurately at a map that you can't see, so presenters had to become skilled at navigating their hands by use of a monitor that showed the composited image. eventually they discovered a solution: project the map onto the blue screen very faintly, so the presenter can see it with the naked eye, but the keyer still sees enough blue to work with.
This was really the only option, because prior to the LCD era, you simply could not buy a quality TV larger than about 36". they were not made, anywhere, for any price, as far as I know. that's not big enough to present from, and while projection TVs could be had in much larger sizes, they also looked godawful and were not nearly bright enough to be visible under studio lighting.
But now we do have LCDs. Really, really cheap ones, that get pretty bright, and can be fed directly from a computer, and as soon as this became an option, stations started using it. I think I have a clip somewhere from like 2007 of a weatherperson simply seated next to a 46" LCD. Like, Just A Teevee, From Walmart. I think the brand was visible. They were just pointing at it, like you do.
And now we have stuff like the above: six 50" sets, turned on their sides and assembled into a pair of much larger 16:9 equivalent displays. My guess is that there's a single PC feeding both of these, with a pair of HDMI outputs going into something like a Matrox Triplehead2go that splits them into separate, rotated images.
This could have been done more cleanly with a couple of 100" displays, but the station was willing to have bezels in the middle of their pictures, probably because it cost a lot less and didn't require another chromakey setup with all the attendant complexities.
To wit, this station (KCRA 3 in Sacramento) still uses keying for their traffic report, and uhhhhh they are struggling haha. The presenter's shadow is too dark and is knocking out the key behind him - they have the spill control cranked so you don't see the blue, but the mid-grey blob behind him is pretty apparent.
I also suspect that the "faint projected image" trick required careful daily adjustment to make sure the camera, projector, and computer image were all collimated so the presenter isn't pointing at the wrong parts of the image - none of these problems will ever happen with a bank of plain old televisions.
pics from a similar setup via TV engineer I know - apparently these displays are driven off a thing called an Avid HDVG, which is (you guessed it!) just a little bastard computer!!
It is extremely funny to me how much TV production gear has a Geforce 8800GTS at its core. Check out that video: the rack chassis looks like a piece of Serious Equipment, but if you open it up you discover a completely ordinary motherboard tray and backplane, freestanding in the middle, like a casemod from 2004. the rack chassis hides the sin
