We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
428
u/in
October, 1931
■it
simultaneous airings throughout the country or a large portion of it. Films destroy this premise, in that a can of pictures can be staggered throughout the nation at will and played at the time choice of the sponsor and station. Should the networks decide to get into film production that, too, is a far-reaching decision because making pictures is a specialized, risky business with huge capital investments required, and certainly far afield from what networks have been mainly engaged in to this time in sound broadcasting. The American Broadcasting Company acquired the old Vitagraph studios in Los Angeles several years ago as its base, and announced an ambitious film-making program. The ABC merger with United Paramount Theatres is a logical outgrowth; and a public offering of stock should supply needed funds.
THE biggest fallacy in television today — bar none — is that the coaxial cable will spurt an immediate flow of programming across country, primarily West to East. This isn't true, as any sound analysis will readily reveal. The time differential between East and West is such that only very, very few programs can command adequate audiences to repay the enormous expenses. Columbia Broadcasting plans to kinescope such programming as it does place on the cable, for stations who cannot pick up the live telecast. Another hindrance is the inclination for mistakes, the limitations of live shows and all the other minus-qualities of unfilmed shows. And, finally, there is the element of cost. The fees for cabling a
show cross-country will be so huge (remember the unbroken space be-, tween San Francisco and the Mid' West) that these charges, plus station!' time, plus the program costs them'v selves will be completely out of reason but for a small number of sponsors or public service events. And so, discount the cable considerably.
To sum up, television is the greatest single challenge of contemporary times. Its deployment for entertainment, for advertising, for education, for information, for public service, and for breaching inter-racial and ; inter-faith mis-understandings is so ■ vast in potential that howsoever high our hopes mount for its successes they ■ may all be materialized. In his defini ' tive study, "Technics and CiviUza'*! tion," Lewis Mumford points out that ' the swift advancements in mechanical means of communication have not ' been thus far accompanied by equal ^ progress in what is moved over those channels; he deplored the same medi' | ocrities that were given voice, simply i at a faster pace. Perhaps — and this may be excessively sanguine — the experimentations attendant to TV will bring some promising changes, at long hard last indeed.
In television Hollywood can find-j expression for profit and leadership that will relegate its past to puniness, Time alone, as always, will determin how this destiny is met but mean while the motion picture indust should appraise and prepare itself fo: the opportunity ahead. To the West, acquiral of this commanding ideological instrumentality is but another of the manifestations that the Pacific Era is more than merely dawning.