Chasing the Rainbow

Hailed as a prodigy, color TV is still a retarded child.

In the five years since its ballyhooed debut in 1953, only 325,000 sets have been sold, v. 10 million black-and-white sets in the comparable first five years of TV broadcasting. Color telecasting still averages only 1 1/2 hours a day, nearly all of it done by NBC alone. And the quality leaves much to be desired, even in the hands of dedicated knob twiddlers.

In its embarrassment, the industry generally maintains an uneasy silence rather than offering excuses or explanations. But last week it was easy to draw complaints and recriminations from all sides. The blasts had one thing in common: everybody blamed the other guy.

Setmakers blame the networks. "The most important reason for the lack of color television sales is the selfish attitude--the public-be-damned attitude--of the money-hungry, profit-hungry television networks [which] have refused to make any really serious effort toward heavy color programing," said Admiral Corp.'s President Ross D. Siragusa recently.

The networks blame the setmakers and dealers. "If those manufacturers who complain about our poor programing would sell color sets as energetically as we program color, there would be no problem in getting color further off the ground," snapped NBC's President Robert Sarnoff. But Sarnoff was admittedly an interested witness, since RCA. NBC's parent company, makes nearly all the color sets sold, and has by far the largest investment in color's success. CBS, which has no such involvement, admits it is not boosting color at the moment, has in fact cut its color programs nearly in half in the last year. Explained CBS Vice President Richard S. Salant: "There's no public demand and no advertiser interest. Nobody gives a damn now. Suddenly, some day, color TV will blossom. We guessed wrong when we thought it would come much sooner." ABC has no color programs at all, and no plans to mount any in the near future.

Fluorescent Figures. In an all-out attempt to put their color operation in the black, RCA launched a major sales drive last year, is still carrying it on. Trade-in offers brought RCA's lowest-priced $495 set down to $399.95. As a result, sales of color sets are up 30% this year over the same period in 1957, while sales of black-and-white sets are off 16%. (Snorted one dealer: "Well, sure--this year they are selling three sets instead of two.")

But there is still little git-up-and-go for color among the other setmakers and many dealers. At least 95% of all color sets now being sold are RCAs. For a while, Motorola, General Electric, Admiral and Westinghouse were turning out color sets with RCA tubes, but all have virtually discontinued commercial production. Says Westinghouse: "Color is apparently not enough of a novelty to sell." Philco, DuMont and General Electric are at work trying to develop a simplified "one-gun" tube that would be cheaper and produce a better picture than RCA's "three-gun" shadow-mask tube, but admit that success is not yet in sight.

Appliance dealers run the range from the hardest sort of sell (southern California in particular) to the attitude expressed by a Manhattan salesman: "I wouldn't sell a color set to my worst enemy. They're just too much trouble for what they cost and what they deliver."

Present color service contracts cost a discouraging $99.50 for the first year, $119 for the second. (Either annual outlay will buy a portable black-and-white set.) Color set owners must acclimate themselves to times when faces suddenly go green or saffron, figures bloom with fluorescence, and backgrounds become crimes against nature or interior decoration. With amazing docility, most color set owners accept these hazards uncomplainingly. Some even boast of learning how to tune their sets as a real accomplishment ; color tuning was an intricate, five-dial operation on RCA's earlier sets, is now somewhat simplified as a three-dial maneuver. Said one Connecticut set owner: "After a while you get used to it."

Noisy Stampede. If color sets could instantly be made much cheaper (they cannot be until genuine mass production is warranted), the public would doubtless snap them up without waiting for more color programs. If substantially more color shows were beamed at home screens (only NBC plans to do so this year), many more buyers would probably surrender to the present high prices. But advertisers will not invest up to 20% more money for color production until they can count on a bigger audience.

The industry dreams aloud of a breakthrough when 1,000,000 color sets will be in use. When that great day comes, the industry believes that black-and-white TV will gradually be trampled into oblivion by the noisy stampede of setmakers, networks, advertisers and public toward the elusive rainbow.

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