Media Madness: TV Challenges Film

couple of really big things were happening. So in the film industry around the studio system model was broken up by the US government because it was monopolistic type of structure. Up to that point, movie studios had had kind of a death grip on the entire process of producing movies.

They had everything from exclusive contracts with talent and directors and writers, to owning film processing facilities to owning chains of movie theaters, so they owned the means of production, of distribution, and exhibition, and the studios were able to leverage their power through block booking to force independent theater owners to agree to screen mediocre films in order to get access to the popular movies that people actually wanted

to see. So they say, oh, if you want big tent pole picture, A you're gonna have to take this other dozen of you know, mediocre westerns as well. But then the Supreme Court waded in and brought all that

to an end. Now, in the recording industry, the emergence of the thirty three and a third and forty five RPM records meant that the venerable seventy eight RBM format was no longer the only game in town, and micro grooves allowed recording studios to fit more audio on each side of a record, so that gave birth to the long playing album and the forty five single, both of which would shape the way music would evolve as well

as how consumers would access music. That was kind of what I ended up talking about in the last one. One other thing I did touch upon in the last episode was how television was just starting to catch on around that same time. Now, technically TV had been around in one form or another, mostly in the research and development stage, for a couple of decades, but due to lots of other things like the Great Depression and World War Two, the rollout of television really didn't get started

in earnest until the late forties and early fifties. TV would play a huge role in our relationship with media and how we access it. Now, it's do a quick jump back to talk about the movie going experience and how that changed over time. So we're gonna rewind just a bit to go into more of a personal experience kind of of of concepts. So, starting around nineteen ten, film studios began to produce newsreels in addition to producing

shorts and features. So these were sort of a predecessor to television news programs that would follow a few decades later. A newsreel would typically contain numerous stories, ranging from current affairs to some rather self serving segments about the entertainment industry. So if you were at a Universal owned theater, you would likely be seeing some coverage of Universal themed events

and and movie premieres and that sort of thing. A newsreel and a cartoon or two might serve as the entertainment before a feature film or maybe even a short film. In fact, back in the day, this is where animated cartoons really got their start. When Disney started up his animation studio, the performance venue for the company's work was in theaters. There were no televisions at that point, at least not outside those prototype labs. And a few backyard experiments.

So the early days of Mickey Mouse and other famous vintage cartoons were geared towards a theatrical release. You would go to a movie theater to see them, So in some cities, theater owners would actually open up a dead hated theater just to run newsreels and cartoons all day long and no feature films at all, so that customers could just pay an admission and then drop in to catch up on some news, maybe watch a couple of shorts,

and then leave whenever they wanted. The news reel served as a model for documentary films as well as how television would first tackle covering the news several decades later. Many studios produced newsreels well into the nineteen fifties, but by the nineteen sixties the practice would come to an end of the United States due to television's rise in popularity and the shift from film coverage to TV coverage

of news events. This is probably a good time for me to mention a lot of what I'm going to talk about specifically in these episodes has to do with the United States. Uh. That's not to say that important things in media weren't happening elsewhere. They absolutely were. In fact,

the early days of the film industry. The whole film industry owes a lot to French entrepreneurs and innovators and inventors, but we're largely concentrating on what happened in the US because a lot of the business practices and technological developments that happened in the States would end up having massive impact across the world. Now, before television really got an established foothold in homes, going to the movies for a lot of families was essentially a weekly event, sometimes more

than once a week. You would go to the film the movies, and along with newspapers and radio, it was how you could find out about news events. You could see the last in short films and animation. Short films gave rise to the establishment of some early franchises like Our Gang, which later on was called The Little Rascals. Laurel and Hardy got uh famous through short films that

were shown in front of features. They both Laurel and Hardy had both been in lots of movies prior to being paired together, but they really found fame as the

comedy duo. It also helped vaudeville acts like the Three Stooges come from the stage to the screen, and so movie studios had incredible incentives to produce an enormous amount of material to keep tempting people back into the theaters because they were going multiple times a week sometimes, So some of these movie studios became sort of content farms. They were just churning out content. They produce good movies.

There were a lot of opportunities for filmmakers to get movies made, but they also just turned out a lot of junk because they needed to fill up all that time. But it worked. At the height of the Golden Age of cinema, more than eighty million Americans were going to the movies at least once per week. And this wasn't the era of the blockbuster either. This wasn't when people would go back to see the same movie over and over. You weren't likely to have the same picture playing in

a theater for months on end. But again, television would change all of that and much of the material that has been produced specifically for theaters which shift over to TV eventually. Now I bring this up to illustrate how society, entertainment, and technology were of folving together over time, and it was changing how we access information or entertainment. And here we see a shift going from a centralized location, namely a movie theater, to accessing the information at home using

radio and television. Of course, that means we need to talk about radio too. That was still a really big thing going on in these days, and and so you could access news through different radio stations. But the power of visuals is a very compelling one for a lot of people, and that's what film and TV were able

to capitalize on. So you had these three prongs all existing at the same time, and of course they all still exist today, and a lot of radio shows and radio studios would get directly involved with producing content for television. In the United States, the big networks of NBC, CBS, and ABC all started as radio networks that more or less quickly moved into television production once it was clear that TV was viable. That viability had to wait until

the end of World War two. It just wasn't really possible to create a new industry based off a novel technology. During the years of the war, governments around the world were imposing rationing on various materials, so companies couldn't produce televisions. They couldn't get the raw materials needed to make the TVs really until after peace was declared. And I should also talk about the business side of media for a bit, because that's a very important component to all of this.

The technology obviously enables media, but the business is what supports it. Like without the business, there's no there's no media, there's no nothing for you to go out and see because something has to pay for all of that. Now

I've covered the business side with film. You know, the film studios were making money by essentially owning the whole production pipeline and selling blocks of films to theaters, as well as taking a share of the box office at least until and then the box office theater relationship was

still important but had changed dramatically. But the movie business was a really profitable business for the successful studios at least, and block booking meant a studio could make money even from a real stinker of a movie, because again, theater owners had no choice but to accept those stinkers if they also wanted to get the good stuff. But what about radio and television. How did they make money? Well,

let's start with radio. Now, back in the very very early days of radio, in the wake of World War One, there was no radio advertising. So how do you make money with a radio station, assuming you weren't in the business of communicating wireless telegrams across the country and acting like a communication system. Well, primarily you did it by also being in the business of selling radio sets. So, in other words, you weren't producing radio programs to make

money directly. You were producing radio programs to create a business case to convince customers to buy a radio set. No one's gonna buy a radio if there's nothing to listen to, So they the companies that were trying to sell radios, whether they were manufacturers or retailers, would create radio stations in order to create the demand for the product they were trying to sell. There were a lot of department stores in the United States that sold radio

sets and also owned a radio broadcast station. Sometimes it was a pretty small one that had a very limited range, but that was how they convinced people to buy radio sets. But there is a big problem with this particular model, and you've probably already spotted it. Eventually you're gonna hit market saturation, which means everyone who can afford a radio has one already, and it's pretty darn hard to convince someone to upgrade their radio set if they're old, one

works just fine. Also, keep in mind that radios were really expensive luxuries when they first debuted. They were not cheap. You couldn't just go out and buy one for ten bucks. They were sometimes hundreds of dollars. And then in August nineteen two everything changed, because that's when a New York radio station with the station I D of w e A F aired the for paid commercial and it was for the Hawthorne Court apartments in Jackson Heights. It was

an innovative approach for the era. A radio station would charge people or company's money and in return, those entities would get air time on the radio. So the more time you wanted, the more you had to pay. The company running w e A F was at the time A T and T, and A T and T had already established the same sort of concept. They applied it

to long distance phone calls. You guys might not remember this, and the older ones of us remember quite well, but back in the old days, you had to pay for long distance calls, and the amount you paid would depend upon how long you're on the phone, and we still sometimes see this with many providers when it comes to international calls. At least, if you happen to be the one traveling internationally, then you want to use a cell

phone on our partnered service. But these days you don't really hear about paid long distance that much any But in the day that that was true, and the longer you stay on the phone, the more you would owe the phone company. Well, this was the same idea, but applied to radio stations. The W E a F model would spread far and wide, with other radio stations following suit. Now, this in turn created a new need in the industry.

Stations needed to get an idea about how many people were tuning into their programs, because the more people that listened, the more valuable that block of programming would be. Right, and then the more money a station could charge for airtime. The station could say, well, if you want to air a commercial during this block of programming, we know that that's our most popular block, and therefore there's a premium

on running ads there. But on the flip side, your ad will reach way more people than if you chose to to advertise during one of these less popular blocks of programming. You know, that's a basic idea, but first you have to measure that. You have to get those metrics. So that created a new industry. It allowed companies like

Nielsen to step in and measure radio consumption. The Nielsen Company had been in the business of retail and consumer studies for more than a decade when in nineteen thirty six it purchased the rights to a device called the autometer. And an autometer would allow like if it's connected to a radio, it would actually record when that radio was on, so when it was powered on, and it would also

register what station the radio had been tuned to. So Nielsen would use that to establish a radio index, and Nielsen could provide information to radio stations and let them know about which programs were the most popular, usually extrapolating the data from their their findings, so they would say that one radio would represent a certain percentage of radios

for the entire region. They wouldn't have full granular detail of every single radio within a given area, so they'd have to kind of you know, there's some guestimation that happens with this, but those in charge of radio programming

could then use that information and they could experiment. They could move programs around and try to find out which time slots worked best for different types of shows and thus maximize their effect You know, you might find out that one program works pretty well in the morning, but it tanks in the afternoon, so it tells you, well, we want to shift that to the morning to maximize

its effectiveness. Then they could turn things over to the sales side of the business, and the sales team could determine what the best advertising rates they could use that the market would support for those different programs. In addition to running ads during or between programs, radio shows also experimented with something that you'll hear in a lot of podcasts and also online video series, and that's sponsored content.

In the early days of radio, station owners were trying all sorts of different ways to incorporate ads without making the audience so irritated that they stopped listening, something we

in the podcasting world still deal with today. So some shows were sponsored by a company outright and at the top of the show, and maybe during station identification breaks, you would hear someone's saying the company's name, like this brought to you by such and such, and sometimes it would be associated with an entire block of programming, like you might have the Texico Star Theater, and some radio shows would actually work in references to sponsors within the

program itself, though it is far more common to hear an ad before, after, or in the break of a program. Turns out a lot of people get a little stevie if you try to work and add into the content of a program itself. The ads of radio would set the ground for similar ads on television decades later, and if you had a radio or later a television, you could access all of the programming in the broadcast range for free. In other words, if your antenna could pick

it up, you could watch it. There are no scrambled channels or anything like that for as far as entertainment goes, and all you had to do in return was watch or listen to a few ads. Of course, this was after you had already ponied up the cash of that was required to actually buy the radio or television set in the first place, which was quite a bit of money.

In the early days. We got a lot more to talk about as far as the business, tech and consumption of media is concerned, but first, let's take a quick break to think our sponsor. Okay, So now we've got the business of film, radio, and TV in the early days covered. As television emerged after World War Two, it

was forcing the film industry to change. The birth of TV news would kill off news reels for the most part, but that was just one small way that DV was causing waves, and television was helped by another trend, a move to the suburbs. So there were a combination of external forces that changed the economic status of lots of

Americans in the years following the First World War. So let's walk through those because all of these are important for us to understand why things happened the way they did, and in turn, the way the economic shift happened shape the way media would change, and it shaped the way we would consume media. So all of these fit together.

It's a real big picture kind of approach. So you had the Great Depression, which was essentially twenty to thirty nine, and that had forced a lot of people around the world, not just in the United States, to do the best they could to save every penny possible because it was a very uncertain economic world out there and everyone was terrified of being destitute, and lots of people were struggling

trying to make ends meet during that that decade. So that had really instilled a sense of responsibility with money to the point where people were, you know, sitting on money that they wouldn't spend because they felt that they

were going to need it later. Then you had World War Two that happened that ended up making a big industrial boom because obviously the to support the war effort, lots of factories would convert over to working on military projects and ended up hiring a lot of people, many women for example, in order to come in and fulfill those needs while a lot of men were off to

fight the war. The soldiers returning home from World War Two did so to families that had a little bit of a nest egg because the women had been working while the men were gone. And people have been saving since the Great Depression, So now you had some disposable income going on. And one of the big purchases families made in the following years, you know, after World War Two,

were homes out in the suburbs. The suburban population in the United States grew by forty three percent between the year's nineteen forty seven and nineteen fifty three, and it was helped in large part by the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of nineteen forty four, better known as the g I Bill, and the g I Bill provided benefits to World War Two veterans that those benefits included low cost mortgages and

one year of unemployment compensation, among many other benefits. At least, if you happen to be white, you would get those benefits. Black veterans found it much more difficult to get access to the benefits their white counterparts parts were getting. They were completely uh owed those benefits they were they were you know, so they met all the requirements to get them.

But the the distribution of benefits was largely a local concern, not a federal concern, and a lot of local governments were not so concerned about granting those benefits out to non white veterans. Now, there's a lot to unpack there, and obviously the story goes much much more deeply than that, but it does lead into some very important discussions about social movements in general. And it's probably a topic for

stuff you missed in history class. But I want to a knowledge that the social structure of the time didn't account for or keyter to a sizeable part of the population. We're talking ten or so of the population at the time.

That's that's significant. Uh So when I start talking about people having disposable income and everything, I'm really talking primarily about white families because they were the ones who were able to take advantage of this government program more in far greater numbers and percentages than non white uh families. So the suburb suburbs were very different from cities. Right. You were no longer living in a dense urban environment. You had uh this larger population living further out from

the infrastructure of urban areas. So suburbs rarely had access to mass transportation. Theaters were almost exclusively in cities, so getting to a theater was no longer as convenient for a lot of Americans. In fact, a lot of the big movie houses, the big classic movie houses that had been built in the twenties, thirties and forties, started to close around this time because there were fewer people to fill them out. They people were out in the suburbs,

not in the cities. So television was really in a good place and was poised to help fill the gap. People still wanted entertainment, but they didn't want to necessarily have to leave their home, travel for a significant amount of time to get to a movie theater and then go see a film. Uh television mint you could get that entertainment right in your own home, at least some entertainment, not exactly the same stuff that was in the theaters.

Movie studios we're seeing profits drop as more people moved away from urban centers. Meanwhile, starting in nine, you had several major television networks that began to broadcast a full schedule during prime time viewing hours, and the movie studios had really two choices. They could try to beat them, or they could try to join them. So programs like

I Love Lucy were gathering a pretty big audience. In fact, I Love Lucy would be ranked the number one show in popularity for four out of its first six seasons, and color television was coming up pretty soon as well, so the movie studios decided to join them, and soon studios were buying up television production and broadcast studios, so movie they were trying to do for the TV industry

what they had already done for the film industry. And then the Supreme Court decision came in and broke up the movie studios, and essentially they also said, hey, you can't do to TV what you did to film. In fact, we're gonna reverse some of what you've done to the film industry and we're gonna prevent you from doing that

with the television industry. The FCC could deny companies a TV broadcast license if those companies have been found guilty of engaging in monopolistic practices, which included all of the movie studios. So they wouldn't be allowed to create broadcast stations themselves. Though they could create television production studios. They can make content end they just couldn't own again, they couldn't own the content production, the processing, and the distribution

and the exhibition of it. They could focus on one of those, and they focused on the content part, and so they could create content for other television stations to broadcast,

and that helped diversify movie studios. They were no longer focusing just on films, and it also meant that they were able to remain relevant longer because without that, there was a real fear that TV was going to kill the film industry, that no one would bother going to the movie theater because they all would have television at home.

That need was made more clear as the nineteen fifties went on because another big event in American politics was unfolding that would have a huge impact on the film industry. And that's what we would now call McCarthy is um So. Joe McCarthy, a U S. Senator, led the charge in Washington, d C. In the nineteen fifties against perceived threats to the American way. And so this was during the Cold War when the United States and then USSR we're racing

to establish themselves as the dominant world power. And McCarthy shook up the United States by leading an investigation that stemmed from a list of alleged members of the Communist Party in the United States, and he framed it as a national security threat, essentially saying, these people are spying

on behalf of the U. S. SR. The government established the House on American Activities Community Committee or h u a C. That committee conducted investigations and held interrogations of lots of accused communists, including many prominent individuals in the media industry, actors, writers, directors, lots of people in that industry began to find themselves blacklisted, and which meant that they could no longer work in that industry at all. No studio would touch them. Others would leave the movie

industry to go seek work and television. And by others I mean people who had not been accused of being a communist. They kind of proactively got out of film because they saw as an industry that was in danger and television was the new star on the rise, so they wanted to hitch their wagons to this this this horse. I'm mixing metaphors left and right. I apologize for that, but like I said, that seemed to be on the

up and up. It seemed to be getting ready to really emerge and become dominant, where whereas the film industry was starting to decline. Now, while movie studios diversified in an effort to remain relevant, they also sought out ways to differentiate film content from television content. Television had to follow in the US a new way had to adhere to specific regulations f c C regulations, and those grew

out of a pretty puritanical morality code. It meant that the content on television had to largely be sanitized and family friendly. Uh. You could not go beyond that, or else you were risking getting fined by the FCC. So that meant that the broadcast stations had to keep everything pretty squeaky clean. For the most part. Movies had a similar set of standards that they were supposed to follow

or else face the possibility of censorship. The original code for films was called the Haze Code or production code that was established uh early in movie history, around nineteen

twenty two. And the reason why it came into being in the first place is because right around nineteen two, a whole mess of scandals were breaking out around Hollywood and it was raising a lot of concerns that the movie industry was inherently immoral and it was corrupting people, and not just the people in the industry, but possibly people watching the films, that the vile behaviors of some of the Hollywood elite would seep through the cinema and

infect the minds of good, decent Americans who were just sitting there trying to watch a movie. Uh. And there were a lot of very serious scandals. I'm not just talking about lighthearted stuff. I mean there were, you know, murders and sue asides and drug use and lots of dark, dark stuff in those early Hollywood days. So the code was kind of meant to counteract that, and it was a list of suggestions, essentially guidelines of stuff you should

and should not do. But the code wasn't really enforced either when it first was was enacted, and movie studios rarely paid more than lip service to it. But then Will Hayes, the guy that the act is is, or the code is often referred to, you know Hayes Code. He was the Postmaster General back at this time. He had proposed the guidelines. He began to threaten studios with

official government censorship, and that changed everything. If studios were told, hey, if you don't if you don't obey by these guidelines, we're not going to let your movies go into theaters, then the movie studios would be out all the money at costs to produce those films. They'd never be able to recapture those costs, so they felt forced to follow the Production Code. Now, that code, like the FCC regulations

for television, was really puritanical at first. So for example, one of the rules was quote the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin end quote. So following such a rule means that you wouldn't be able to make a film with a sympathetic villain, at least not without running in danger of violating this code. The villain had to clearly be in the wrong. The audience was supposed to want to see the villain get taken down and not feel

anything other than joy when it happened. Films weren't supposed to have nudity or any suggestive content. There weren't supposed to be any depictions of illicit drug use. And also, uh, there were some things that went beyond puritanical to just playing you know, racists, like there were supposed to be no depictions of interracial romance in film under the Hayes Code. Now, the Hayes Code was tweaked several times as social morays changed.

Film studios wanted to cater to audiences, and the audience tastes had changed over time, and yet this code still existed, so they did their best to kind of change things

around a little bit. Uh. Studios were also struggling to attract audiences, so there was a greater need to cater to their wants, and some filmmakers went so far as to completely ignore the code since it was technically a voluntary code, so they were running the risk of having their films denied the chance to be screened in theaters, but they were making what they wanted to make. Now, in some cases, theaters would refuse to show the films

and they just wouldn't get screened. But in other cases, the demand for the film was so high because people had heard about it and they really wanted to see it. And it wasn't that the film was like salacious or lascivious. It was that the movie was gritty but really good. Theaters would get enough demand where they would show it even without the official seal of approval that indicated the

movie adhered to the Haze code. And there were some movies that even got nominated for Oscars that fell into this category. And again that showed that if the movie was considered good enough to be a a paragon of the art form, then the code needed to be changed. So it stayed in place. Uh you know, it was

tweeked several times, but stayed in place still. Nineteen sixty eight, that's when the motion picture Association of America came up with a an alternative system, a system of voluntary film ratings,

and that's the system we're familiar with today. So in that case, movie studios could push the limits of what could be shown on a movie screen, and then they would get rated by a committee, and the rating would tell audiences what they could expect in such a film, but it wouldn't restrict the filmmakers over what they could include in their movies. The filmmakers could put whatever they

wanted in the film. It's just that that would you know, if it was super dark or super sexual in nature, then they would get a rating that would buy its very nature limit the number of people who would see the movie. So the that would help regulate the industry in a different way. Studios would make calculated risks about what kind of films they wanted to produce, and if they thought, well, this is a really gritty film, but it's going to attract a big adult audience, that's fine,

they would go forward with it. So movies became more violent, they began to include sexual situations, and they were typically able to include material that television could not include. So that was one way that again media changed because of technology. The television industry was taking was, at least in theory, taking ticket sales away from the movies. But then the

movies were able to offer something that television couldn't. Now by that point, more than half the homes in America had televisions in them, and so the film industry's migration to more gritty content was a necessary move to survive in that era of television. Movie studios were producing some of the TV shows that we're making it to broadcast,

and we're becoming media conglomerates in the process. This would continue on over the following years, and it also would include stuff not just movie and television, but also obviously music label record recording studios, that kind of thing. So you would end up having these conglomerates that would cover all forms of entertainment. Um, we'll talk more about that

in future episode. Movie studios also brought in revenue by licensing their respective back catalogs of films for television syndication. So back to television for a bit. Like radio, television studios depended upon advertising dollars for revenue. The first TV ad to ever air did so way back in when only a few thousand television sets were in the United States and it was for Boulova watches. And this ad only aired in New York and it lasted a whopping

ten whole seconds. It costs less than ten dollars to make. No telling how effective that ad was, but it was a a not really an indicator for what was going to come next. So by the nineteen fifties, lots of brands were sponsoring blocks of programming very similar to what was happening in radio. So you might hear about I Love Lucy sponsored by Philip Morris, for example. In two the first commercial for a toy ever aired. That toy would be Mr Potato Head, which in those days consisted

of just a collection of pieces. You wouldn't get a big plastic potato. Instead, you would use those pieces and attach those to a real potato. Potato was not included. The commercial helped push the toy to great success, and it really showed that advertising was a very effective way for manufacturers to boost sales of their products. And there were two ways you could get a television broadcast in the early days of television. Really around again night that

was a really important year in media in general. That's when you're looking at you know, the records UH changing formats, you're looking at the studio system getting broken up. But it was also the way that you started to see differentiation of getting television. One way to get TV was to use an antenna for over the air broadcasts, so you're picking up the television signals over the air. So I can remember adjusting the bunny ear antenna on our television lots of times as a kid in an effort

to improve incoming signal. But the other way you could get television signals, which dates all the way back to nineteen gate, is cable television. Now, it's different from what we think of as cable TV today. Cable TV did not debut as a competitor with broadcast television right away. You know, you didn't have UH content specifically made for cable TV for decades. Instead, it was created to address

a particular technological challenge. People who lived in remote areas far from broadcast stations would frequently have trouble picking up over the air signals. They would buy a television that they weren't getting a strong and the signal to be

able to watch anything. One way to fix that problem was to have a group get together or maybe a company form to erect a large antenna, typically on an elevated region that would be able to pick up broadcast signals from far away, and then run physical cables from this antenna or the station connected to the antenna down to televisions that belonged to customers who would subscribe to

this convenient service, and boom cable television. So let's say you live out in the sticks and you pay a small fee to someone who owns a really big antenna, and they run a cable out to your house, and so you can watch the same stuff that you would be able to watch if your antenna could just pick up those those broadcast signals. Cable actually debuted in three separate areas of the United States right around the same time. Those three areas where Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and Oregon. Then it

moved into major metropolitan areas over the following decade. Many cities had similar problems to remote areas. If you happen to live in the shadow of a really big building that stands stands between you and a broadcast signals origin, you might have trouble getting that broadcast signal. So cable companies began to rise up, giving concern to broadcast stations.

The concern deepened when as cable companies erected better antenna's, they discovered they could pick up broadcasts from different regional markets and deliver all of those to the cable company's customers. And now it actually was an advantage to have cable over just broadcast antenna. And there were TV companies that protested the rise of pay TV or subscription based cable. Meanwhile,

consumers were getting access to more programming from different regions. So, in other words, to explain this, because these antenna were so big and capable of picking up UH signals much better than your your television's little antenna, you could sometimes

pick up programming meant for a totally different market. So here in Atlanta, we might pick up stuff that was being broadcast in Chattanooga, for example, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and that would mean that we could watch channels that were regional

to Atlanta as well as those for for Chattanooga. Some stuff would probably be duplicated, you know, you'd watch a program that is is shown on both affiliates of the same network, and some stuff would be local, so you'd be able to watch the local programming for both Atlanta and Chattanooga. This was actually a problem, but we'll get into more about that in just a second. The first color television program to be broadcast was a CBS program

and actually aired on June ninety one. It was not exactly a global or even a nationwide event because the broadcast was only compatible with CBS designed color TVs, which used an electro mechanical design, and I talked about this not too long ago in the r c A episodes. In fact, only twelve televisions in all of America were able to pick up and display this program, so it would be a while before color television would become a standard,

and it wouldn't be CBSS model that would do it. Instead, we're talking about our CIA's electronic approach to color television, which would win out over cbs is design due to lots of different reasons. Again I had covered this in

the r c A episodes. One of those reasons was another war, this time the Korean War, which impacted CBS ability to manufacture their color television sets and gave our c A enough time to perfect the electronic approach, or at least perfected enough to make it a practical alternative to CBS is design, and again there was a need to create content in a color format to drive demand for color television sets. Adoption of color television was pretty slow,

largely because of two problems. Color TVs were more expensive than black and white sets, and there just wasn't much color television programming to watch, so that would be the next problem that the industry would have to solve. I'll explain more in just a second, but let's take another quick break. NBC became the first television network to offer

live broadcasts in color, starting in nineteen fifty four. NBC's parent company r C, a Radio Corporation of America, had a vested interest, seeing as how it had essentially established the color television standard and was in the business of manufacturing color television sets. But color broadcasts were special events for nearly a decade. It wasn't until the nineteen sixties that a million color television sets had been purchased by American consumers and created enough of a demand to justify

color television production on a grand scale. One company to jump to the challenge was Walt Disney Productions. The Disney studio was navigating the same choppy waters as other film studios, with added challenges that come along with building a business on the relatively expensive art form of animation. Walt Disney

Productions produced a television anthology series. It originally aired on ABC, but in nineteen sixty one they would jump on over to NBC to produce The Wonderful World of Color because NBC was capable of broadcasting and color to a large market. That series helped convince more Americans to invest in purchasing color televisions, and that created more pressure on the other networks and production studios to upgrade and start producing more

content and color. The NBC by the mid sixties said it was the all color network and like almost a hundred percent of its programming was in color at that point, but the process to go to full color took a really, really long time, with some regional broadcasts remaining in black and white until the late nineteen seventies. So this wasn't like a flip a switch and everything changes kind of moment. It wasn't Wizard of Oz where it goes from black

and white to color in an instant. Back to cable in nineteen sixty four, the Federal Communications Commission stepped in to regulate cable television. So the FCC forces cable operators to blackout programming that was picked up from distant markets if it duplicated the programming from a local station within the cable company service area, and that was only if

the local station requested it. So, in other words, if I'm running an Atlanta ABC affiliate and I happen to know there's a cable company that is picking up my signal and giving it to people who are in my service area, but they just can't pick up my broadcast signal,

that's fine. But then if I find out they're also serving up Chattanooga's signal and Chattanooga has some of the duplicate programming as Atlanta, you know, the Chattanooga ABC is showing some of the same shows that I'm showing, I could demand that those programs get blacked out of the offering from that cable company. And the reason for that is again advertising, right, Like I, I depend on ads

to generate revenue for my business. If it turns out that people in my service area are able to watch the same programming but on another provider, then they're not watching my channel. I can't use their demographic to help set a sales price for my advertising fees, and so I'm gonna have to sell advertising for lower than I would otherwise. So that was considered an unfair practice. It was it was harming the businesses efforts to do business.

So the FCC said, all right, well, if you complain, if you if you file a complaint about this, then we will certainly step in and tell the station cut it out, you know, block out the Chattanooga ABC affiliate for the duplicate programming and just allow the local programming and that's it. In nine seventy, the first cable television

network's debut, and that was another huge game changer. So up until this point, cable had been all about distributing over the air signals to people who otherwise had trouble picking up those signals. But now production companies were looking into creating studios specifically to produce content for cable. So this wasn't capturing over the air broadcast and then uh sending it to people who otherwise couldn't get it. This was creating content specifically for those people who were using cable.

Cable would allow for a new type of television pay TV networks, so unlike a broadcast network, which was free to access and supported by ads um, you could access those over the year if you had the right antenna and you were within range. The cable approach would allow producers to encode a signal so that only people who had subscribed to the service could decode it on their end, typically with a specific cable box, So you would pay a subscription fee to get access to that service, and

then you would be able to watch that network. The first such pay TV network ever was HBO or Home Box Office, which launched in nineteen seventy two. HBO also ushered in the era of domestic satellite transmission, allowing a network to beam programming up to a satellite, which in turn could distribue that signal across a broad region and beam to other satellites if necessary for greater coverage, and

you weren't beaming it straight to customers. So HBO studios has the signal for a film that they are going to show on the network, they beam that signal up to a satellite. The satellite then beams it down to regional stations around the United States, and those regional stations can then serve that signal up to the customers. So you at home wouldn't have access to this unless you went out and purchased an enormous satellite dish, in which case, yeah,

then you can get access. The second service to use the domestic satellites was Atlanta's own television station w TBS TED Turner station, the first super station. Now, unlike HBO, you didn't have to pay to access this station. Specifically, the emergence of cable networks fueled interest in the technology, and millions of people began to subscribe to cable and that gave a lot of anxiety to the broadcast networks. So you started to see a lot of struggles in

the government uh circles regarding this. Around that same time, we saw the birth of another new type of media over in the film world, the blockbuster. Now, these are movies then not only attract a large audience, they also tap into something special that convinces that audience to see the film more than one time. Most historians. Film historians tagged Jaws as the first film to be a summer blockbuster.

Jaws came out in nineteen In fact, fun trivia, it was the number one film at the box office when I was born, and it remains one of my favorite films of all time. Universal had spent nearly two million dollars advertising Jaws, which was a considerable marketing budget for

the time, and the marketing was incredibly effective. Jaws open to a seven million dollar opening weekend, which is paltry by today's standards, but back then that was enormous, and it was called a blockbuster because people would line up around the block to get movie theater tickets to go see this film more than once. Universal also chose to

put Jaws into wide release right away. Earlier studios would typically release a film in small markets or maybe just a few large markets at the same time see how well it does before deciding whether or not to move into other markets. So there were chances that you would never get a chance to see a film at all, just because it never came to your area. But Universal in this case said no, we're gonna go big. Then we're gonna go nationwide. We're gonna capitalize on this marketing

and it worked. Hollywood immediately investigated ways to capture that same lightning in a bottle. Marketing efforts changed and more unusual projects would get pushed forward. When Star Wars debuted in nineteen seventy seven, it was to a similar reception and the blockbuster was well cemented in film logic and is that way to this day. That's why we have so many of these big tent pole type films, especially the ones that open up in May and throughout the summer.

Film found another way to differentiate itself from television through spectacle and a communal experience. Now we're gonna close out this episode by touching on an industry I haven't really talked very much about in this episode, which is the recording industry. The introduction of micro grooves for LPs really

transformed the recording industry early. Didn't hurt that those changes happened right around the same time that middle class Americans found themselves with more disposable income for the same reasons I talked about earlier, and around that same time, Less Paul, the guy who became famous for building the first solid body electric guitar, pioneered what we call sound on sound recording, also known as overdubbing or double tracking and then later

on multi tracking. Up until Less Paul introduced that technique, recording music meant that you had to gather all the musicians together at the same time, and you would use one or more microphones, but you would record everyone playing simultaneously, and that also meant that you might have to move some musicians further away or closer to the microphones in order to be heard along with everybody else. So it was different from the old acoustic horn days, but still

in that same general realm. Less Paul pioneered multi track recording, in which multiple signals could be recorded on two different tracks of the same length of magnetic tape. This would allow musicians to record sessions separately if they wanted to. Um they could each record their own particular part to a specific track, and collectively those tracks would represent a song.

But you could also record each part on its own if you wanted to, and you could have the drummer record the drum track first, and then have the bass player record the bass track, and then etcetera, etcetera. There had been some experiments with that sort of thing in the past, but less Paul's approach was the most practical

and it transformed the recording industry. He worked with the engineers at the company Ampex to develop a three track recorder which would later turn into a four track recorder, and then on and on and on. Each track could be recorded and even erased independently, which was incredibly helpful. So if you laid down the perfect rhythm guitar track and then you whiffed it while playing lead guitar, you can actually go back and re record the lead guitar

part without erasing the rhythm track. It was incredibly useful. It meant that you didn't have to sit there and try and record the same song eight and seventy three times in a row. It also opened up new opportunities for musicians to experiment with their art. They could incorporate all sorts of different instruments and effects, and the experimental gradually evolved into the main stream, but that always takes time. Bands like the Beatles and the Beach Boys were pioneers

with multi track recordings. The Beatles song Strawberry Fields Forever was actually made up of two different versions of the same songs spliced together that George Martin, the producer, was in charge of cutting those tracks apart and then piecing them back together to make one song out of two different takes. As the technology evolved, engineers produced recording devices capable of supporting more tracks. The next big jump was

up to eight tracks. Eventually we got twenty four track recorders and those are stackable, so you could have multiples of twenty four. You have seventy two tracks if you wanted. So how does that work. Well, let's say you've got a string quartet in the studio. You want to record them all to one track that's going to be part of a rock song. You don't want to record them along with the rest of the band because you'd never be able to pick up the strings and the recording

you wouldn't even hear them. So you mike their instruments and those mics feed into a mixing console, which the engineer tunes to get the right amount of recorded volume for the track. They balance it properly, and the mixing console connects to the multi track recorder, which will send the signal to a specific track on the magnetic tape and in separate recording session, you can record the band with each of their microphone instruments leading to the mixing

console and recorded onto separate tracks. And so you might have one track that's the stringed group, and then you have one track that might be the drummer and one track that might be a guitarist, etcetera, etcetera, and all without having to erase the string section that you already have. And obviously you don't necessarily have to go in that order.

I was just doing that as a hypothetical example. Now, one other thing that happened in the mid nineteen fifties was that recording studios began to purchase and install equipment that allowed for stereo recording. That gave studios the chance to record separate signals for the right and left hand

speakers on separate tracks on quarter inch magnetic tape. Moreover, it was possible to record those separate signals into a single groove on a record, and so by nineteen fifty six, record companies began to release albums both in mono or in single channel sound that's what mono is, or in stereo sounds. So you could often buy the exact same album in both mono and stereo, one of each. So

now the nature of recorded sound changes. The introduction of multitrack recording and stereo sound opened up a lot of possibilities for musicians and engineers to play with and it would also open up a new market, that of the

audio file. These are fans of recorded works who want a system that will best reproduce the sound the artist intended when making the recording, whether that means a perfect reproduction of what was recorded in the studio or a faithful reproduction of whatever the artist's original vision happened to be. Audio files tend to be really passionate people. They have very strong opinions about which formats, which pieces of equipment, and even which cables you should use to create the

perfect home stereo sound system. Devoted audio files might spend thousands of dollars building out their systems, and so this desire for high fidelity sound would fuel a very healthy electronics industry which continues to this day. Um the this sets the stage for the next evolution in the recording industry that would have a really big impact on the business and consumer sides, and that would be the emergence

of consumer at tapes. Magnetic tape was being used on the industry side, on the recording side of the business to lay down tracks in recording studios that would later be transferred onto master recordings and used to produce vinyl LPs and forty singles. But in the nineties sixties, magnetic tape would find its way into consumer cassettes, and that would change things in a really big way. It would opened up new opportunities for ways to consume music. It

made music more portable than ever before. It would also impact the quality of the recorded audio, and it would drive audio files nuts, not to mention set the stage for our modern era of music, and it would open up the possibility for something that had so far been

pretty difficult to do. Piracy. So that sets the stage for our next episode, where we'll talk more about home theater, the emergence of the home theater, and how that changed lots of things, the business side, the content creation side, and the consumption side, and we'll start getting closer to modern day. I don't think we'll quite make it up to the digital realm, or at least not into the most recent digital realm, until the episode after that one.

So I know this is an epic series, but I also find it absolutely fascinating to see how these changes have happened over the years, and it also informs us a lot about other things, Like I haven't even really touched on it, but this also had a huge role that you know, the way that the technology evolved had a huge role in shaping things like copyright law as well. So maybe I'll touch on that in a future episode.

Is in addition to the ones I already have planned. Um, but like I said, it gets really big and really complicated and really messy, and I love it. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Send me an email. The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Make sure you dropped by our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com.

Will find the archive for all of our old episodes on their plus links to our social media presence, so go check that out and a link to our store. Remember everything you purchased there goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.