Television digest with electronics reports (Jan-Dec 1956)

3 (3) "An intensive and broad-scale uhf research program is vital to both the rapid amelioration and the long-term solution of the uhf problem." Senate Commerce Committee staff, meanwhile, is preparing interim report on allocations for submission to Senators. While Committee has made no commitment to issue any report before it concludes over-all TV inquiry, chances are that it will. Best guess as to principal recommendation in report; De intermixture . Report is not expected for at least a couple weeks. NBC COUNTER-ATTACK HITS FILM PROMOTERS': NBC launched a slashing offensive against detractors of networks this week end — aiming its biggest guns at KTTV pres. Dick Moore, whom it called spokesman of an "organized campaign" by TV film syndicators, feature film promoters and fee-TV interests to landermine the network system and to reduce TV to "the lowest common Hollywood denominator." "At stake is the existence of network TV broadcasting," said NBC in the first network comments filed in Senate Commerce Committee's investigation of network practices. Answering Moore's charges before the Committee (Vol. 12:13), NBC strongly defended option time and must-buy practices as desirable, essential and legal. Sen. Bricker (R-0. ) tangled with CBS pres. Frank Stanton, meanwhile, in an exchange of letters revolving about the issue of whether Bricker is trying to suppress the networks and subject them to public-utility regulation (see p. 4). * ^ ^ ^ NBC charged Moore's testimony was "part of an organized campaign previously agreed upon and financed by a group of film syndicators and related interests, whom Mr. Moore served as treasurer and to whom he has made periodic progress reports." It added: "This film group had a series of meetings, agreed upon the retainer of counsel who represented Mr. Moore at his appearance before this Committee, and consulted together on the network attack to be made through Mr. Moore." Among group's members, NBC identified TV film syndicators Ziv, TPA, Official Films . Screen Gems (Columbia Pictures) — as well as General Teleradio (General Tire & RKO Pictures). "Other interests seeking to profit by displacing the network system," it said, are distributors of feature films and fee-TV proponents. "These film interests and financial traders," said NBC, "if successful in their designs on TV, could reap a mountain of profit from the molehill of their contribution to the broadcasting art. But if they achieve their objectives, the American public and the vital new industry of TV will be the twin losers... "The film interests represented by Mr. Moore have played no role in creating the industry. Their efforts have rather been to smother it. Now that it is healthy and profitable, however, they seek to take it over and to replace a vital live program service with standardized film shows. They ask for governmental action to achieve this end, action which would strike at the heart of the network system... They claim that the networks are restraining other elements in the industry. Yet without the networks the industry itself and these elements of it would not exist. Far from restraining the industry, the networks have created it." Prime function of networks — to provide balanced flow of live programming taking advantage of TV's immediacy and ability to communicate events as they are happening — can't be replaced by syndicated films or by "musty and outdated" products of Hollywood's vaults "which would hit TV with the impact of a tidal wave" if networks were maimed or destroyed, the NBC statement argued. In an implied answer to Sen. Bricker 's "monopoly" charges, NBC outlined its early losses in TV; In 1941, it already had cumulative TV loss of over |2, 000, 000; in 1947, it lost another $2,000,000; in 1948, about $1,300,000. "From 1947 through 1954, the NBC-TV network was substantially in the red on a cumulative basis." Net income for 1947-55 aggregated mere 0.4% of sales. * * * ♦ Defending option time, NBC made these points: (1) "For national advertisers, option time provides the only means of obtaining from a network. .. the collective national circulation generated by a specific network program series. . .which is broadcast at a designated time for which the advertis