Television digest with electronics reports (Jan-Dec 1954)

phosphor lines on face. Reported drawback is very complicated circuitry required to drive it; we hear it initially demanded a 100-tube chassis, then 60, currently 47. Tube itself is supposed to be simple to produce. Philco will say nothing. There's one axiom of trade to be remembered in considering any undisclosed products: When a manufacturer has something saleable, he usually shouts his wares. Small tube makers who don't make receivers are also uncertain. For example. National Video Corp. pres. Asher Cole has view similar to Dr. Baker's, saying: "The shadow-mask tube is very tough to make. The RCA flat-mask type was impossible to make; that's why RCA dropped it. The curved-mask type can be made by brute force, but it still isn't simple enough. Placement of those dots requires a witch doctor. The §175 price is purely arbitrary." Dr. Allen B. DuMont finds a definite "trend toward standardization" in the RCA, CBS-Hytron and DuMont choice of principle. He says: have the patents." He looks for 21-in. & 17-in. rectangular to emerge as dominant types in color just as they did in black-&-white. Dr. Baker also foresees rectangular types evolving — "for the same reasons they did in monochrome." Dr. DuMont sees only "a small sale" in color coming season. "I can't get excited about it," he told us. "Sets will have to get down to $300 to $500 before there's any sort of volume. That's still a couple years off." :{; * 4= Hallicraf ters pres. Wm. Halligan also urged caution on color sales prospects, telling distributors at regional sales meeting: "Don't let anyone's high pressure publicity or propaganda cause you to be booby-trapped into this color situation." Hallicraf ters v.p. Richard Graver said big push won't come until price hits $500. There are several dates to mark on your calendar as focal points in the color battle: Aug . 22 , when CBS kicks off color programming with Toast of the Town extravaganza; Sept. 12, when NBC launches its color season with first 90-min. color "spectacular" ; Sept. 15, when RCA demonstrates 21-in. for first time. And from now on, you can also expect individual stations to start whooping it up as they get prepared to carry big network shows, and a few will trumpet their own originations. EPITOMIZING THE INDUSTRY'S GROWTH: From a 4-page supplement in 1947 to a 400-page volnmfi that is a veritable World Almanac of the TV-radio-electronics industries, the fall edition of our semi-annual TV Factbook (No. 19) is really a barometer of fantastic growth. What we called TV Directory No. 1 in Nov. 1947, less than 7 years ago, listed mere 16 stations on air, 55 CPs outstanding, 48 applications pending. The new Factbook sets forth rates, facilities, ownership and personnel data on 589 stations that were on the air as of July 15, plus 40 more due before year's end. It gives same details on 12 Canadian stations in operation and 9 upcoming. And it details 217 CPs for new stations outstanding, 211 station applications pending. If a sponsor wanted to buy an hour of prime time on all of the 382 commercial stations in operation July 15 (the 7 others are educational), it would cost him just $194,875 — an average of $510.14 per station for Class A time, which is generally 6-11 p.m. Highest rates are $6200 & $6000 charged by network keys WNBT & WCBS-TV, New York. Lowest is the $90 of KVOS-TV, Bellingham, Wash. , though there are quite a few charging $100 to $150 an evening hour. Purchase of such a "TV blanket," were it possible, would guarantee that some 51,000,000 TV sets could receive no other message at that time — for the Factbook's trade statistics show approximately 33,000,000 sets produced since 1946, and it's known some 2,000,000 are now in trade pipelines. Also revealed is fact that U. S. has 5 times as many TV stations as rest of world combined, for Factbook lists 110 stations in 32 foreign countries (see story, page 5). New features in the compendium are text of the FCC Color Standards and the J. Vi/alter Thompson Jan. 1, 1954 count of TV households in first 340 markets of U.S. The Factbook brings up to date the, allocation tables, lists of CPs relinquished and