Television Goes Commercial

Television, whoaed, geed and hawed from season to season by the Federal Communications Commission, broke out of its experimental hobbles last week. With a giddap from FCC, it took a few tentative commercial steps. It looked pretty spavined.

To live up to FCC specifications for commercial broadcasting, manufacturers are now altering all the sets now in use. These receivers were built to reproduce an image of 441 lines. Authorized transmitters will broadcast 525 lines and FM sound, so that televisionaries tuning in on NBC broadcasts will probably get murky pictures and fuzzy sound if their sets are not changed over. Nobody will hear or see CBS television, murky or otherwise, on unaltered sets. CBS is on a band no layman can currently pick up. As a matter of fact, CBS is not ready yet for commercial operation, won't be for about another month.

NBC celebrated its commercial tag by telecasting a Brooklyn-Philadelphia ballgame from Ebbets Field. Bulova Watch Co. paid $4 for a time signal before the game, $8 for another in the evening. Sun Oil Co. shelled out $100 to televize Lowell Thomas and his news, Procter & Gamble paid the same to put on Truth or Consequences and Lever Bros, another $100 to give their television of Uncle Jim's Question Bee.

Sponsorship was not television's main worry. It had good reason to brood about its priorities listing, which is so low that there is not much chance that many sets will be added to the estimated 4,500 now in operation.

Still cogent was the acid observation made by NBC's Niles Trammell before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee last month. Said he: "We are now ordered to divest ourselves of one of our network services . . . while at the same time, the licensing policy of the Commission encourages our entrance into the operation of new stations in the fields of television and FM. The older service of broadcasting is profitable, but the new services are yet to produce any revenue. Apparently the Commission favors our loss of present investments and revenue, but wants us to invest in new fields."

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