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IS TELEVISION TOMORROW'S RADIO?
TELEVISION PROBLEMS
Courtesy of Tide and Columbia Broadcasting System.
(Continued from page 13)
proach which merges sight and sound and which will require that the audi¬ ence both see and hear, in order to get the full drift of the show; the second technique is one in which the visual portion is merely an adjunct to the sound — which will make it possible tor a person to enjoy a television program without having to “view” it beyond an occasional glance — much as you might listen to a symphony with closed eyes and only from time to time look up at the orchestra.
Unless this second technique is de¬ veloped, television is going to face a difficult situation, because the housewife cannot be expected to drop her pots and pans and stay glued to her set. If she can’t work and listen, she will just have to not listen.
Cost of Network Television
Question: “Do you foresee rate bat¬ tles?”
Answer: Wherever there are rates, there are battles. I don’t know how, in a free competitive system, you can avoid it.
The Westinghouse suggestion of a network of stratospheric television transmitters is not only an example of the bold and imaginative engineering being lavished on the medium; it is also an example of the cost factor. This skyway transmission, you recall, envisions a series of transmitters, built into giant stratoliners which, while circling at a height of 30,000 feet over ground studios, pick up television sig¬ nals and broadcast them to the homes in a wide area around these ground studios.
As I read the dispatches, I learn it will take a web of 14 plane-transmit¬ ters to achieve an 80 per cent coverage of the country; and it will cost $1000 an hour to operate each plane. So, we have television paying $14,000 an hour for station operations, and the pro¬ grams still have to be piped — by co¬ axial cable or radio relay — from the originating point to one of the 14 ground control studios and relayed by microwave from one to another. Add to this the cost of time and talent — and you begin to get an idea of the ex¬ tremely high cost of network television.
I suspect that it will be a long time before rates in television become suf¬ ficiently competitive to cause battles.
Inventions Upset Predictions
Let me, in closing, revert to the sec¬ ond paragraph of these remarks in which I disclaimed having any special pipeline into the future. The thoughts I have set down are common sense, if somewhat hard-headed, projections of the facts such as we have them today. If within the next two or three years an invention is unveiled which, in rela¬ tion to television, even remotely ap¬ proaches the devastating effect of an atom bomb — then all bets are off!
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