THE FIGHT FOR 40,000,000 TELEVISION SETS
Landry, Robert J.
The Fight for 40,000,000 Television Sets By ROBERT J. LANDRY THE majority of Americans still have not seen any sort of television set and are accordingly no little perplexed by the raging feud of...
...Behind the battie lines the bitter pride of powerful individuals may be felt...
...Probably the essential first fact to bear in mind is just this: from 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 black and white sets might have been sold to the American public if the Government had not promulgated its endorsement of the Columbia Broadcasting System method of producing TV in color and along with this endorsement authorized CBS to proceed with commercial broadcasts (i.e...
...Allies are rallied, foes badgered, neutrals courted...
...This monumental bit of atrocious taste recoiled against the industry...
...The Television Manufactures advertising agency, in a desperate move to offset the color publicity, resorted to a full-page blare that no parent who loved his children could, in decency, deny them a TV set at Christmas, meaning a black and white set...
...The fierce struggle of the present moment derives from the longtime theoretical argument being validated by the Federal Communications ROBERT J. LANDRY, editor of Space & Time, a weekly commentary on ad' vertising, was Variety's original radio editor and served for six years as Director of Program Writing at the Columbia Broadcasting System...
...Today the big television factories are put in the light of seeming to stall color the better to enjoy their own black and white prosperity just as 10 years ago CBS was accused of stalling any television the better to enjoy its own radio prosperity...
...Think of black and white as a luxury express bearing tycoons to glory...
...Indeed, he would be a bold reporter who declared, categorically, "here is the single truth, the way it was, the shape of the thing" with regard to color TV...
...Not all the facts are on the record...
...It just happens to—tg hear the critics of the opposition...
...Commission after years of hearings and 10,000 pages of testimony...
...The Fight for 40,000,000 Television Sets By ROBERT J. LANDRY THE majority of Americans still have not seen any sort of television set and are accordingly no little perplexed by the raging feud of the tycoons over color television as an extension of black and white...
...CBS has been arguing the negative since 1940...
...People are puzzled by the vituperation, the unto-death grimness—especially since the film industry accommodates both black and white and technicolor movies without taking the case for either to the high Federal judiciary...
...The controversy can be pictured in railroading terms...
...After years of more or less slow growth the factory is tooled up to turn out hundreds or thousands of black and white sets daily...
...The prospective purchaser must make up his owtt mind...
...In a towering rage a distributor of black and white sets canceled his entire advertising schedule with that newspaper...
...There is a stubborn will against granting any merit to the CBS color system...
...Neither CBS nor anybody else expects color to replace black and white in a hurry, if indeed it ever entirely replaces it...
...Color as a possibility has long been known, although advocated for the immediate present only by CBS...
...RCA dared the FCC to authorize both CBS and RCA systems and leave the choice to the buying public...
...Indeed this very fact angers the industrialists who have poured money, patience and years of effort into their present production rhythm...
...It has never been, and is not now, that clear or simple...
...Nobody wants to see Santa Claus bumped off...
...How touchy everybody had become within a few weeks of the FCC decision may be seen in these unrelated incidents...
...CBS is exploiting the two related facts, one, that only a minority of American homes (about 8,000,000) now have TV sets and that hundreds of thousands of black and white sets now on factory floors' can be easily "adapted" for a few' dollars each to receive color...
...II The predicament of the average big television factory is not hard to understand and one may readily sympathize...
...Moreover, not all the facts are on the record...
...Hence the war for public opinion, meaning the market...
...RCA strengthened its position in early December when it again de-monstrated its own color tube, this time with much improved fidelity...
...The negative has always been the same...
...An advertising publication was sued for libel for an innocuous item interpreted, wrongly, as a veiled hint that a certain retail chain was taking sides with CBS against RCA...
...There follows a frightful publicity crash...
...This alone might induce a public relations campaign of furious animosity...
...Black and white television is already a tremendous success and need apologize to none for its remarkable record of achievement in building a new industry and a new form of entertainment...
...Long a threat, suddenly a reality and, in effect, "the law of the land" color television, and one company's system, are imposed from the outside by Government fiat...
...From those traveling black and white with the supposed guarantee of the FCC come cries of outrage and alarm...
...But it was a measure of the emotional climate...
...It is the spoilsport of a carefully-planned and arduously-executed industrial boom...
...Black and white is here, and good...
...Color is another problem for another day...
...Cynics have said that generous gestures came cheap to CBS, which stands to gain great future advantages, whereas manufacturers stand to lose real present advantages...
...But even this observation is glib and only part of the explanation...
...CBS, remember, has no plant, manufactures nothing...
...There should be no black and white television to start with...
...Add to the economiti'HHLJeXlS, UoUi i>l "them Pleasa to the manufacturers, the Passion private feelings of highly Place personages and it may make more sense...
...Actually the FCC decision favoring color, or even CBS color, would have been easier to live with five years earlier in 1945, or five years later in 1955...
...We go back to our opening remark...
...Suddenly a later express is given the go-ahead, switched onto the same, crowded, single track of a still-new and incomplete right-of-way...
...High-powered public relations counsels move into action...
...The thing which the black and white entrepreneurs have trouble explaining away, and the real cause of the FCC endorsement is this: the CBS color system works remarkably well...
...Right now there are no color receivers and very little color transmission equipment...
...Eight months ago CBS distributed full drawings of its system to over 50 TV manufacturers...
...Why, then, the unwillingness to compromise...
...Color is coming, and good...
...The FCC has created confusion, doubt, caution, sales resistance overnight...
...Henry Morgan, the radio buffoon, was fired by NBC for "being funny" about color, although the parties later made a point of denying this...
...no longer "experimental") in color...
...Nobody can say positively that it is the ultimate system but for the moment it has the considerable practical advantage of being the system that works...
...It also just happens that CBS' staff television expert, Peter Goldmark, is a genius...
...This dramatic change throws into sharp outline the many-chaptered commercial rivalry of two organizations, Radio Corporation of America and CBS, but the fight is not between them alone...
...CBS itself has talked mildly of wanting only a nominal royalty ($1 a set) for the use of its patents...
...This may be said: the medium is bigger than its protagonists...
...What's behind this furious fuss...
...Coming in the fall of 1950, just as the black and white boom was on, the decision could not have been more ill-timed...
...Humanly enough, the manufacturer wants to take up color at a time of his own choosing and convenience when the black and white boom is spent...
...CBS had stood charged with insincerity in opposing the ready-to-go kind of television, black and white, on a plea that another kind of television, not then ready, would come soon after...
...This amounts to saying that there is no need for a life-and-death struggle, that manufacturers can go on making and selling black and white sets protected against the possibility of color...
...Hence the all-out propaganda and litigation to undo the damage, if it can be undone, or at the least to contain the threat and minimize it...
...TV ought to be held back until all may start together in and with color...
...Remember, too, that Christmas was just ahead, that black and white sets were selling at the rate of 30,000 a day...
...Practically the full membership of the Radio-Television Manufacturers Association is united in regarding CBS as "an outsider" and color as premature...
...Whether color TV ultimately supplements or supplants black and white, nobody knows...
...For all the occasional gaucheries of a Milton Berle or an Arthur Godfrey, TV programming has made more progress in two years than radio made in 20 years...
...A New England newspaper printed the comments of a New York critic favoring CBS color...
Vol. 15 • January 1951 • No. 1
