The State Of Television In 1952…Hosted By Dave Garroway
The State Of Television In 1952…Hosted By Dave Garroway
This is a film made by RCA for use in theaters…a kind of “short subject” infotainment project designed to sell the virtues of that new thing called television, and more directly, RCA television sets.
Until Milton Berle came to television as host of ‘The Texaco Star Theater’ in June of 1948, television set sales moved at a snail’s pace. After that, sales took off, but the sets were still expensive. RCA and others manufacturers ate a lot of the costs and had to be aggressive in their marketing and going into theaters to sell their wares was part of the game.
As this opens, we see Garroway of the set of ‘Today’ in it’s first year, with an RCA TK30 and a huge lavalier mic. You’ll notice that a lot of the subject matter revolves around sports…that was one of the few areas that networks had for bringing immediacy to their broadcasts. All four, Dumont, ABC, CBS and NBC depended heavily on boxing and in particular, wrestling as a draw for the male demo in those early years. Enjoy and share! – Bobby Ellerbee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84AUSFbWIw
From 1952, here is the first host of the “Today” Show, Dave Garroway, talking about the relatively new medium of Television, showing many of the shows that w…
Though many have credited ‘Uncle Miltie’ with launching TV’s success, along with that is the fact that 1948 was a pivotal year for TV broadcast station licensing. The FCC was deluged with licensing requests and granted many of them in 1948, resulting in a large number of TV stations to sign on for the first time in that year. TV set sales zoomed in 1948 mostly because viewers had stations on the air to watch. Before 1948, there were only a handful of stations available in only the largest cities.