The U.S. launch of commercial television is generally considered to coincide with the start of the New York World’s Fair. On April 30, 1939, “U.S. RCA and NBC boss David Sarnoff flipped the switch and NBC broadcast three and a half hours of live material from the sprawling World’s Fair site in the Flushing Meadows area of Queens,” as Variety’s Cynthia Littleton recounts.
One of the first things to go out on the air was the image of then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt saying, “I hereby dedicate the World’s Fair.”
In a recent blog post, journalist Mark Hamrick observes that the World’s Fair itself was an exercise in “deliberate optimism,” being hosted 10 years into the Great Depression. The Fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” was intended to signal that the future was worth imagining.
I’d add that TV’s launch during the Fair was its own exercise in optimism. Television was then considered an offshoot of radio. As such, regulations around its introduction were to be made by the FCC’s Television Committee. An article in the May 1, 1939, issue of Broadcasting magazine explains that the committee had yet to recommend standards for transmitters and receivers. At issue was whether to establish reception specifications that would last for a set period of time or simply declare television to be experimental and let the buyer beware. Other unsolved issues included questions about channel allocation and how to encourage networks, which the Committee considered a necessity after it calculated that the cost of programming would be “immeasurably higher than aural broadcasting.” They wanted a way to spread production costs over multiple locations.
As it turned out, the FCC had plenty of time to resolve these and other questions. Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, meant that “all of the engineering and technological work that had been devoted to the development of television since the mid-1920s was diverted to military purposes to support the war effort.” It wasn’t until 1946 that television sets became generally available to American consumers.
The second notable milestone in broadcast television’s U.S. history is the 65th anniversary of FCC Commissioner Newton Minow’s address to the NAB’s convention in Washington D.C. on May 9, 1961.
Most of us have only ever heard this speech referred to by its dismissive moniker, the “Vast Wasteland speech.” But have you ever made time to read or to listen to it? It’s actually very positive and in keeping with President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” agenda for the newly elected administration.
The first thing that struck me was how Minow opened his remarks to the group of broadcasters that he was responsible for regulating. He said:
… I want you to know that you have my admiration and my respect. Yours is a most honorable profession. Anyone who is in the broadcasting business has a tough row to hoe. You earn your bread by using public property. When you work in broadcasting you volunteer for public service, public pressure and public regulation. You must compete with other attractions and other investments, and the only way you can do it is to prove to us every three years that you should have been in business in the first place.
Minow goes on to lay out his understanding of the broadcast television business at that time. First, he comments that the industry had increased its total profits by 9.7% between 1959 and 1960, despite the country being in a recession. Next, he quotes a columnist who claimed that the New Frontier FCC was going to be historically tough in terms of broadcast regulation, clarifying that his FCC planned to enforce the public interest standard, not to “muzzle or censor broadcasting.” His intention, he said, is “to help broadcasting, not to harm it.”
Where Minow said he had an issue was that he did not believe that “over-all programming is aimed accurately at the public taste.” He went on to say that ratings should not determine what programming is shown when children are watching TV. “If parents, teachers and ministers conducted their responsibilities by following the ratings, children would have a steady diet of ice cream, school holidays and no Sunday school.”
It was for these reasons Minow felt that broadcasters should not simply cater to the nation’s whims, but they must also serve their country’s needs. He then laid out the six principles that were to guide his term as FCC chairman, all the while stressing fairness in approach.
With a nod to the future, Minow concluded his remarks saying he felt that “most of television’s problems stem from lack of competition.” His solutions included a pay TV experiment in New York and tests of UHF broadcasting. It was those two experiments that paved the way for the 1996 Telecommunications Act and perhaps even provided the foundation for today’s digital broadcast transmissions.
Let’s fast forward to today. I Just read a column by Derek Thompson which argues that, in media, “Everything that is not already television is turning into television.”
He gives three examples. First, he says that Meta argues that it’s not a social media company because the majority of time spent on its platforms is spent watching videos — greater than 80% for Facebook and more than 90% for Instagram. Thompson’s second point is that podcasts are becoming increasingly video. Video podcast consumption is growing 20 times faster than audio-only. Finally, he says both Meta (Vibes) and OpenAI (Sora) have just introduced AI social networks that show videos operated by artificial intelligence.
This move, in which everything becomes television, certainly wouldn’t have been anticipated in 1931 and probably not even in 1961.
Going back to that 1939 World’s Fair in New York, Mark Hamrick points out that the most popular exhibit was General Motors’ Futurama. It was set up as “a scale model of America in 1960: interstate highways, automated cities and abundant consumer goods.” As he sums up, the takeaway is not that the planners were naïve. There were two things going on. First was that they wanted to project optimism. And perhaps more importantly, as Hamrick states, “every generation builds its vision of the future against a backdrop it cannot fully see.”
If you agree with Thompson’s assessment that “everything is television,” our future will contain infinitely more video, the area in which television broadcasters excel. It will also involve things we cannot predict. Wildcards include AI, changing market conditions, geopolitical risks and a host of other factors.
The point is not that imagining the future is a fruitless exercise. It’s that you must plan for a future worth imagining and expect some surprises. Or as a CFO once said to me as we finalized a proposed budget: “We now have the one scenario we know will not happen, but we have a roadmap.”
It’s time to invent the future, again.
The post The ‘Everything Is Television’ Era Has Arrived. It Should Give Broadcasters Optimism appeared first on TV News Check.
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