Television’s First Rate Card…July 1, 1941
Television’s First Rate Card…
July 1, 1941 is the day NBC’s experimental station, W2XBS began commercial broadcasting as WNBT, New York.
The call letters W2XBS meant W2XB-south, with W2XB being the call letters of the first experimental station, started a few months earlier at General Electric’s main factory in Schenectady, which is north of New York City. W2XB became WRGB. GE was the parent company of both RCA and NBC, and technical research was done at the Schenectady plant from 1928 till 1933.
In ’33, RCA converted one of the new Rockefeller Plaza radio studios, 3H, to a television test studio. For the next six years, RCA would control 3H and only relinquished it to NBC in early 1939, just before the World’s Fair.
At the bottom of the card, there are facility rates and note the “large studio” and “small studio” entries. This is actually a little sales magic of sorts. Until 8G came along in 1948, Studio 3H was all there was in the television department. What “small studio” actually meant was a one camera shoot in part of 3H. “Large Studio” would have included use of all three cameras and the full studio.
What a great slice of history, shared it with my Media Buying friends…lol!
of course the audience was fairly small back then, but mostly well off.
I chucked because in the early ’80s, one local affiliate I worked for was still charging $150/hr for studio time. Ha!
$75 in 1941 is around $1200 in today’s dollars.
I love the $75 for “Field Pickups”. I think we get about $4000 for our Ku Sat trucks these days.