TELEVISION STILL A CINDERELLA

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22513, 17 December 1947, Page 4

TELEVISION STILL A CINDERELLA

I SHORTCOMINGS IN ENTERTAINMENT VALUE j

RING BOUTS SEEN IN NEW YORK TESTS ]

If you have seen a group of people standing about the entrance of a barber’s shop, a bar, or a sports depot, and you heard the staccato phrases of an excited sports announcer, you would probably have guessed that these Americans were listening-in (like Australians to the Melbourne Cup), to the World’s Series baseball, writes Godfrey Rlunden, the Sydney Morning Herald’s correspondent in New York.

You would have been wrong only in one particular. These would not have been merely “listeners-in” but also “lookers-in”. For almost every barber’s shop and popular bar-room in New York today is equipped with television, and every big sports event now draws its thousands of "lookers-in”.

vision, at enormous cost to their shareholders, because it has always looked as though popular, and therefore profitable, success was just around the corner.

“Will Never Develop Like Radio”

, It is the belief of many of these investors today, however, that television will never develop into a new entertainment medium like radio, that its function will be to supplement other forms of public entertainment. To this end many of the big television companies have during the last four or five years looked to some method of utilising the vast telephone circuit as a means of distributing television programmes.

In fact, in the area of Madison Square Garden there are scores of bars where the boxing fraternity gathers every "fight night" to see the show and, incidentally, to get a better view of the fight than they would sitting in the bleachers. A number of these bars are within easy earshot of Madison Square Garden, and the light fans can hear, and participate in, the vast roar of excitment rising out of the arena a few score of yards away. The boxing matches are about the best thing offering on the television circuit just now, mainly because the ring is always spotlighted, the area is small, thus permitting and the boxers can easily be distinguished by their special "television” pants. Baseball, because of its rapid movement, the tiny ball, and the big arena is less satisfactory. But there are other attractions, (Britain, by the way, has the edge on America in television.)

The telephone service in America, unlike that of Australia, is not a Government monopoly and telephone companies are always on the look-out for new ways of extending their services. The ordinary telephone line, although it connects millions upon millions of people, is unsuitable for television, which requires a waveband about a thousand -times as wide as that provided for telephone use. For a long time the television companies have been bogged down over this problem and only recently have claimed to be near a solution. Their solution is to transmit both by radio and telephone simultaneously. To send a narrow band of “key” frequencies by telephone (like the middle register of a musical instrument, for example) and to send the other frequencies by radio wave and to combine both in a sharp image at the receiving end.

Movements of Orchestra Seen

In addition to hearing symphony orchestras. you can now follow the movement of the orchestra, as the television eye roves from conductor to players. In its early and more hopeful sessions the United Nations could be seen on the television screen. Like a candid camera, the television lens would move over the rows of delegates, searching out and exposing their boredom, their attention or lack of it during the historymaking speeches. You can also see advertisements. Instead of the now-familiar sponsor’s advertisement, the television looker may be startled to see flashed on the screen a box of “crisp toasties” or whatnot. Despite these occasional commercial shots, television is still free from advertising exploitation, not ' through choice to be sure, but because the advertisers have found more profitable ways of spending their money. The advertisers do not like television because they have yet to be convinced that there is any sizeable television audience in spite of the evidence of bar rooms and barbers’ shops and the television manufacturers who are booming the sale of television receivers in every daily newspaper.

Plans for the Future

There have been a few private demonstrations of this technique which according to capable observers were quite satisfactory. The inventors (a combination of radio company and telephone company), however are looking beyond the ordinary kind o f service supplied by television today. They are looking forward to the time when they will be able to sell a television receiver which is connected to the household telephone circuit, so that the customer is certain of a good reception wherever he is. The customer will then be offered a variety of programmes, and to ensure reception, all he has to do is to notify the telephone company in advance, or in the case of automatic sets, to dial a number and have the programme come through. The charge would be added to the subscriber’s usual monthly telephone account.

This system now seems technically feasible. But the real problem is still an economic one.

Sets Priced at from £IOO to £3OO

Even though you can now buy a television receiver from three hundred to one thousand dollars (one to three hundred pounds) and desk sets “suitable for business men” are pictured in television advertisements, the programme sponsors fight shy of the new entertainment.

Who will provide the programmes? Who will pay for them? The inventors of this new system appear to have high hopes that the motion picture producers will cooperate with them, in as much as it will be possible, through the telephone company, to charge the subscriber a sum not vastly smaller than the price of a movie ticket, for a first-run or second-run movie shown in their own home.

They have sound reasons. It is reckoned that even with this latest boom in television there are not more than thirty thousand television receivers in the United States.

But the movie producers are still very shy of television, particularly as the majority of the producers are also the owners of movie theatres, and there seems little likelihood that television’s Prince Charming will emerge from Hollywood. Meanwhile, Cinderella goes on dreaming.

Most of these are around big cities like New York, because it is one of the peculiarities of television that its range is roughly equivalent to visual range of the transmitter. That is why New York’s television transmitters are situated at the top of the city’s highest buildings, such as the Empire State Building, which can be seen for distances up to thirty miles from Manhattan.

Nevertheless, despite the vast potential audience covered in these limits television is still the Cinderella of the show, business.

Probably no scientific development of recent years has looked so promising, has had so much research and money spent on it, and yet has consistently failed to take the public fancy. Certain Amount of Eye-Strain

All kinds of reasons have been advanced for television’s failure—the radio broadcasting comoanies have held it down because they* do not want competition; Hollywod has boycotted it; faulty sets have been put on the market; it costs too much, etc., etc. The real cause seems to be simply that the public does not care about "looking in’’ even though on special occasions it may show some curiosity about television programmes. Even though the images are now fairly clear there is still a certain amount of gye-strain caused by constant attention to the fluorescent screen. Furthermore, the programmes, except the sports events are generally uninteresting. Nevertheless, there is a huge amount of American capital invested in television. These investors are mainly radio corporations which went into televison early in its history in order not to be out-distanced by their competitors, and have continued in tele-