The digital apocalypse continues to blight the
lives of television producers, music-industry
executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom
are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure
their business models in such a way as to allow
them to make an honest buck. They're trying to
second-guess the futureso why not look back at
the past? Today''s new-media revolution, after
all, is not the first time that technological
change has laid waste to the best-laid plans of
the old media. The same thing was happening 60 years ago.
Everybody in America was talking about TV early
in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned
a set of their own. Network radio was still the
dominant mass entertainment Âmedium. If you
wanted to listen to Bing Crosby or "The Quiz
Kids," you tuned in to their radio programs.
While there were roughly 85 million radios in use
throughout America, there were 1.3 million TV
sets, 750,000 of which were on the East Coast.
Television was still a pricey toy. A console set
with a 16-inch picture tube cost $695 in
1949half the price of a new car. EEvery TV
station in the country was operating in the red,
and NBC ran its fledgling TV network at a loss of
$13,000 a day, $116,000 in Âtoday's dollars.
But on Jan. 11 of that year, television in
America turned a technological corner when eight
stations on the East Coast and seven Midwestern
stations were linked via the first long-distance
coaxial cable. All at once it was possible for a
significant slice of the American public to watch
network TV programs live. Within a matter of
weeks, Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater,"
previously known only to those who lived within
range of one of NBC's nine East Coast affiliates,
was being viewed in 24 cities by an audience of
almost 4.5 million. In May, Time magazine put
Berle on its cover: "As the clock nears 8 along
the Eastern Seaboard on Tuesday night, a strange
new phenomenon takes place in U.S. urban life.
Business falls off in many a nightclub,
theater-ticket sales are light, neighborhood
movie audiences thin. Some late-hour shopkeepers
post signs and close up for the night. ... On
big-city bar rails along the coast and in the
Midwest, there is hardly room for another foot."
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574357332713730174.html>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/08/new-media-crisis-of-1949.htm>monochrom
at 8/24/2009 11:26:00 PM
