Media Madness: TV Challenges Film

In the second part on our series of media and tech, we look at how the rise of television forced the film industry to change. We also learn about the rise of cable television and the further evolution of the recording industry.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm
your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with How
Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and love all Things tech.
And in a previous episode just not too long ago,

(00:26):
I traced the journey of recorded audio and film from
early commercial efforts up to about nineteen fifty when a
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.

(00:47):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:30):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:36):
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

(02:59):
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

(03:22):
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

(03:44):
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

(04:06):
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

(04:27):
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,

(04:48):
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

(05:10):
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

(05:32):
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

(05:54):
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.

(06:17):
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

(06:39):
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

(07:02):
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

(07:23):
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.

(07:45):
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.

(08:07):
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.

(08:28):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:09):
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

(09:29):
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.

(09:52):
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

(10:14):
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

(10:36):
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

(10:58):
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

(11:19):
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

(11:39):
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

(12:02):
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,

(12:23):
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

(12:45):
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

(13:06):
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

(13:28):
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

(13:51):
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

(14:12):
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

(14:34):
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

(14:55):
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

(15:16):
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

(15:36):
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

(15:56):
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

(16:20):
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

(16:44):
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

(17:04):
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

(17:26):
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

(17:48):
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

(18:09):
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

(18:30):
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

(18:52):
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

(19:15):
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

(19:37):
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

(19:59):
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

(20:20):
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

(20:41):
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

(21:02):
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

(21:23):
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

(21:47):
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,

(22:07):
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

(22:29):
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

(22:51):
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

(23:13):
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

(23:33):
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

(23:55):
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

(24:15):
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

(24:35):
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

(24:55):
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

(25:16):
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

(25:39):
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

(26:02):
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,

(26:23):
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

(26:47):
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

(27:07):
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

(27:28):
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,

(27:50):
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

(28:11):
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

(28:33):
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,

(28:55):
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

(29:19):
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,

(29:40):
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

(30:01):
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

(30:22):
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

(30:45):
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

(31:05):
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,

(31:26):
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

(31:46):
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

(32:09):
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

(32:29):
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

(32:52):
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

(33:12):
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.

(33:35):
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

(33:56):
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

(34:18):
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.

(34:40):
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

(35:00):
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

(35:23):
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

(35:44):
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,

(36:07):
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

(36:29):
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

(36:54):
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

(37:14):
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

(37:35):
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

(37:57):
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

(38:19):
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,

(38:40):
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

(39:05):
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

(39:28):
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

(39:50):
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.

(40:11):
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,

(40:32):
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

(40:53):
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

(41:14):
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

(41:37):
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

(41:57):
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.

(42:21):
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

(42:43):
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

(43:06):
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

(43:29):
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

(43:52):
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

(44:15):
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,

(44:37):
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

(44:59):
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

(45:21):
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

(45:41):
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

(46:02):
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

(46:23):
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

(46:46):
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.

(47:06):
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

(47:27):
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

(47:49):
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

(48:11):
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

(48:33):
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

(48:53):
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

(49:15):
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

(49:36):
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

(49:58):
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

(50:18):
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

(50:40):
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

(51:02):
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

(51:24):
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

(51:47):
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

(52:08):
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

(52:29):
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

(52:51):
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

(53:13):
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

(53:34):
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

(53:56):
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

(54:16):
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.

(54:37):
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.

(55:00):
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

(55:21):
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
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