jun 25, 1951 - Color Television

Description:

In the post-war era, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) faced numerous requests to establish new television stations. Concerned about the limited number of channels available, the FCC put a moratorium on all new licenses in 1948 while considering the problem. The rapid development of radio receiver electronics during the war opened a wide band of higher frequencies for practical use, and the FCC set aside a large section of these new UHF bands for television broadcast. At the time, black-and-white television broadcasting was still in its infancy in the U.S., and the FCC started to look at ways of using this newly available bandwidth for color broadcasts.

The Joint Technical Advisory Committee (JTAC) was formed to study color systems in 1948. CBS displayed improved versions of its original design, now using a single 6 MHz channel (like existing black-and-white signals) at 144 fields per second and 405 lines of resolution. Color Television Inc. (CTI) demonstrated its line-sequential system, while Philco demonstrated a dot-sequential system based on its beam-index tube-based "Apple" tube technology. The CBS system was by far the best-developed and won head-to-head testing every time.

RCA was working on a dot-sequential system that was compatible with existing black-and-white broadcasts, but declined to demonstrate it during the first series of meetings. Just before the JTAC presented its findings, RCA broke its silence and introduced its system as well. After the resolution of an ensuing RCA lawsuit, color broadcasts using the CBS system started on 25 June 1951.

After a series of hearings beginning in September 1949, the FCC found the RCA and CTI systems fraught with technical problems, inaccurate color reproduction, and expensive equipment. The CBS system was formally approved as the U.S. color broadcasting standard on 11 October 1950. An unsuccessful lawsuit by RCA delayed the first commercial network broadcast in color until 25 June 1951, when a musical variety special titled simply Premiere was shown over a network of five East Coast CBS affiliates.

While the CBS color broadcasting schedule gradually expanded to twelve hours per week and the color network expanded to eleven affiliates as far west as Chicago, its commercial success was doomed by the lack of color receivers necessary to watch the programs, the refusal of television manufacturers to create adapter mechanisms for their existing black-and-white sets, and the unwillingness of advertisers to sponsor broadcasts seen by almost no one.

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