|
The Day the TV Died
by
Stephen Bates
Untitled Document
“‘DTV’
IS COMING (AND SOONER THAN YOU THINK!)” proclaims the Federal
Communications Commission website. With, perhaps, a touch of panic?
Digital television—DTV—will
replace the venerable analog format on February 17, 2009, at midnight, time
zone by time zone. The changeover won’t affect most Americans who get
TV by cable or satellite, or those who already own digital TVs or
converters, or the handful of iconoclasts (less than two percent of
households) who don’t own TVs at all. But that leaves millions of
people at risk of severe entertainment deficit.
By various estimates, between 10 and 15 percent of
American households watch over-the-air programming
exclusively, relying on rabbit ears, rooftop contraptions, and other gear
from the I Love Lucy era. A third of these People of the Airwaves don’t know about the digital
shift, according to a poll by the Consumer Reports National Research
Center. If DTV arrived tomorrow, some 20 million Americans would turn on American Idol and find
Randy, Paula, and Simon replaced by snow.
People will be able to continue watching
over-the-air broadcasts on analog TVs if they get converter boxes, which
currently cost around $60. The Commerce Department’s National
Telecommunications and Information Administration is offering every
household two coupons, each worth $40 toward a converter. According to the
poll, though, three-fourths of Americans haven’t heard
about the coupons.
That’s not the only complication.
After DTV Day, some households—about
one in 20, according to FCC chairman Kevin Martin—will have
to spring for new antennas to pick up the same channels.
The February 17 deadline doesn’t apply to the
nation’s 2,100 low-powered TV stations, which include many
rural and university-run outlets. If you want to watch those
channels with a converter, you’ll need a special one with
“analog pass-through,” or an antenna switch, or the
patience to disconnect your antenna from the converter and connect it to
the TV.
The digital converter replaces your TV’s tuner,
so it comes with its own remote. Unless you buy and program a universal
remote, you’ll use the converter’s remote to change channels
and the TV’s remote to adjust volume—alongside,
perhaps, the armamentarium of DVD and VCR remotes. Speaking ofVCRs, if you want to record one
program while watching another, you’ll need two converters. If each
of the converters happens to be, say, a Zenith model DTT900, then using the
remote to change channels on the TV converter will also cause the channels
to change on the VCR converter. “Yeah, that’s a problem,”
a clerk at Circuit City told me.
The DTV disruption comes by federal decree, and
Congress has its reasons. Because the digital format is far more efficient,
it can produce sharper images, enable broadcasters to offer additional
channels or data services, and free up spectrum space for wireless
broadband, public-safety communications, and other uses. The
United States isn’t alone in this process. In Great Britain, the
transition is already under way, region by region, to be completed in 2012.
Finland went all-digital on September 1, 2007. In most of the
world, digital will soon be the television standard.
These transitions can be ticklish, as we’re
likely to discover next February. But standards themselves mostly make life
easier. Standardization is “the liberator that relegates the problems
that have been already solved to their proper place,” insurance
expert Albert Whitney wrote in 1928. Back then, standardization had a long
way to go. Imagine buying sheets when beds came in 78 sizes. Washers in
household faucets, The New York Times said in 1927, were “almost impossible to replace, even
in supply stores in large cities.”
At the time, an engineer was striving to tame the
anarchy. Shortly after President Warren G. Harding made him secretary of
commerce, in 1921, Herbert Hoover established the Division of Simplified Practice.
(“Simplified” was chosen, a Commerce official explained,
because “standardized” sounded “Prussian.”) The
agency helped establish national standards for everything from
pickaxes to grape baskets.
The federal simplifiers aimed to facilitate rather
than dictate. In 1923, for instance, they assembled some 200
representatives of the lumber industry, who decided that the standard
construction board would be 25/32 of an inch thick. Hoover called it
“a splendid example of industry solving its own problems.”
But the solution wasn’t universally acclaimed.
Companies that manufactured thinner boards, 24/32 of an inch, wanted their
measure to be the norm. In “the battle of the
32nd”—Hoover’s jocular phrase—they
lost.
That’s the common pattern. When standards are
set, somebody wins and somebody loses.
In the major skirmishes
over broadcast standards, David Sarnoff was the winner. Born in Russia in
1891, Sarnoff arrived in the United States at the age of nine, unable to
speak any English. In his teens, he studied Morse code and landed a job at
American Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, first as an office boy and
then as a telegrapher. When Guglielmo Marconi visited his company’s
U.S. branch, Sarnoff connived to meet him and soon became his
protégé. In 1919, the federal government voiced misgivings
about British-owned Marconi controlling vital American
technology. General Electric bought American Marconi and shifted its key
assets to a new firm, Radio Corporation of America. Among those key assets
was Sarnoff. He soared through the company’s ranks, reaching the
presidency a decade later.
Well before most executives and engineers, Sarnoff saw
the future of TV—some reporters called him a
“televisionary”—and he plotted to put RCA at the
forefront, whatever it took. “Competition brings out the best in
products and the worst in men,” he once remarked. Within the company,
broadcast historian Alex McKenzie writes, Sarnoff’s rages
“could strike like a thunderbolt.” Sarnoff sought not just to
make history but to ensure his place in it. Horatio Alger comparisons irked
him, because he considered his ascent unparalleled. At RCA, he had copies
of his own memos bound in leather.
In 1930, when Sarnoff became head of RCA, a handful of
American television stations operated on an experimental, noncommercial
basis. But would-be viewers, mostly shortwave hobbyists, had a
hard time tuning in. “Various frequencies were used, some in the
standard broadcast band and some in the shortwave bands,”
historians John Ryder and Donald Fink write in their encomium to electrical
engineering, Engineers and Electrons (1984). “There were no standards for the number of
lines or number of pictures per second used by these stations, and no
attention was paid to the bandwidth required to carry the
transmissions.”
Commercial TV, Sarnoff often said, was “just
around the corner.” But the corner kept receding. In 1936, at one of
Sarnoff’s demonstrations, E. B. White watched the TV image jitter and
undulate. “President Roosevelt’s face not only came and
went,” he observed, “it came and
went under water.”
The picture traveled from the studio by wire to RCA’s transmitter,
then by ether to the screen in front of White. “The magical
unlikelihood of this occasion,” he wrote, “was not lessened any
by the fact that a stranger wearing a telephone around his neck was
crawling about on all fours in the darkness at our feet. This didn’t
make television seem any too practical for the living room of one’s
own home, although of course homes are changing.”
Regulators agreed: TV wasn’t yet
living-room ready. Members of the Federal Radio Commission
and its successor, the FCC, hesitated to set broadcast standards.
“Rigid adoption of standards at this state of the art,” the FCC
said in 1939, “may either ‘freeze’ the television
industry, and thus retard future development, or may result in a high rate
of obsolescence of equipment purchased by the public.” A year later,
the commission warned that Americans “should not be inflicted with a
hodgepodge of different television broadcasting and receiving
sets.”
But without standards, a hodgepodge already existed.
In 1938, Communicating Systems Inc. marketed TVs for $150 (three-inch
screen) and $250 (five-inch screen), with one-year
guarantees—not that the sets wouldn’t break, but that
they wouldn’t become wholly obsolete. By the end of 1939, American
Television, DuMont, Andrea Radio Corporation, General Electric, and RCA
were selling TVs too. Everything from the number of channels to the hue of
the images (black and white or black and green) varied from set to set.
Gutsy early adopters bought TVs, but dueling standards and scant
programming scared off most consumers.
In 1939, the FCC authorized television to take a small
step forward. Experimental stations could adopt “limited
commercialization”—that is, sell ads to pay for creating
programs but not for broadcasting them. Commercial TV was to have a soft
rollout. “No interests should be permitted to raise public hopes
falsely,” the FCC stressed. In particular, “nothing should be
done which will encourage a large public investment in receivers which . . .
may become obsolete in a relatively short time.”
But self-restraint wasn’t
Sarnoff’s style. He bought full-page ads touting discounted
RCA sets, which could receive RCA’s shows but not those of some other
broadcasters. The era of home TV wasn’t just around the corner, he
said—it was here. This was precisely the sort of hype the FCC had tried to prevent. The commission suspended
the limited commercial broadcasting and chastised RCA.
Sarnoff was unapologetic. In his view, consumers would
willingly risk obsolescence in order to enjoy television. A TV buyer, he
said, “is paying for the unique privilege of seeing what is important
or interesting today in a program of news, information, entertainment,
education, and sports events which he cannot witness tomorrow or next year,
however great the technical improvements. . . . The miracle of sight
transmitted through the air should not be treated on the [same] basis of
obsolescence as a spring hat.”
A television costing hundreds of dollars is no spring
hat. But under pressure from RCA, the FCC reversed course and decided
to establish TV standards, even if they might
later have to be changed.
The commission sought recommendations from broadcasters. The understanding
was that if broadcasters could achieve consensus, the FCC, like Herbert
Hoover’s Division of Simplified Practice, would go along.
Broadcasters formed the National Television
Systems Committee. The NTSC had barely gotten started when CBS muddied the
picture by announcing the development of color TV. Created by engineer
Peter Goldmark, the CBS camera captured images through a rapidly spinning
disc with red, blue, and green filters. This disc was synchronized with a
disc spinning inside the TV. When the camera transmitted its red signal,
the red filter on the receiver’s disc was positioned in front of the
picture tube’s electron beam.
In NTSC sessions, Zenith and
Stromberg-Carlson urged the adoption of CBS color, whereas RCA,
General Electric, and other companies opposed it. Technical matters were
secondary to “rival corporate interests,” Joseph Udelson writes
in The Great Television Race (1982). As newcomers to TV manufacturing, Zenith and
Stromberg-Carlson could gear up to make color TVs with no added
costs. The other firms had spent heavily on equipment to produce
black-and-white TVs. They didn’t want to have to start
over. In the end, the majority ruled: Color was, for the time being,
kaput.
Of the other issues confronting the NTSC, the most
contentious was the number of lines per TV image. The more lines, the
greater the clarity. RCA wanted 441, Philco wanted 800, and DuMont argued
that with the technology still evolving, flexibility would be
ideal—televisions should be capable of picking up
broadcasts of anywhere between 400 and 800 lines. (Some of the first
TVs had used 60 lines, producing an effect somewhat like watching actors
through half-closed venetian blinds.) The NTSC rejected the wide
range proposed by DuMont, saying it would make TVs pricier and images
fuzzier, and set a standard of 525 lines. According to The Tube (1996), by David Fisher
and Marshall Jon Fisher, the number had no technical advantage. It was
simply a compromise.
Over DuMont’s protests, the FCC adopted the NTSC
standards—the basic rules that have governed analog TV
ever since—and authorized stations to go fully commercial.
RCA opened 10 service centers around New York where consumers could take
their TVs to be retrofitted, without charge, to conform to the new
standards. On July 1, 1941, RCA station WNBT (later WNBC) went on the air.
Its first ad, which was sold for $4, showed a Bulova clock as the second
hand circled the face, to the tune of the Minute
Waltz. The ticking seconds marked the
beginning of the television era.
While the fight over
television standards was raging, Sarnoff was also boosting TV through what Fortune later called “the biggest and
bitterest behind-the-scenes fight” in radio’s
history—against a friend.
As an undergraduate at Columbia University, Edwin
Howard Armstrong made commercial radio feasible: He found a way to amplify
the output so that broadcasts could play through speakers instead of
stethoscope-like earphones. The Armstrong method also allowed
receivers to pick up transmissions from previously inconceivable distances,
across the Atlantic and the Pacific. During World War I, Armstrong
developed the “superheterodyne,” with which radios and
later televisions could be tuned precisely to broadcasts.
One of the people who saw Armstrong demonstrate his
amplifying invention, in a basement lab at Columbia, was Sarnoff. The two
became friends. Armstrong frequently visited Sarnoff’s house for
morning coffee; Sarnoff attended Armstrong’s
wedding—to Sarnoff’s former secretary. RCA bought
licenses for some of Armstrong’s patents and disputed the validity of
others, which made for an odd friendship. When a decision in
Armstrong’s favor was handed down in one lawsuit, Sarnoff
congratulated him on the ruling even as RCA denounced it.
“I wish that someone would come up with a little
black box to eliminate static,” Sarnoff remarked to Armstrong at one point in the early 1920s. In Empire of the Air (1991), Tom
Lewis speculates that Sarnoff envisioned a filter between a radio’s
receiver and its speaker. Instead, Armstrong found that he could eliminate
static by modulating the frequency of a broadcast instead of its
amplitude—that is, by using what we know as FM instead of
AM. Like a 441-line screen and an 800-line one, FM and AM were
incompatible. FM sets couldn’t get AM, and vice versa.
In 1933, Armstrong demonstrated FM to Sarnoff, who
recognized the discovery as both ingenious and perilous. RCA sold AM sets
and owned two AM networks. With its clarity, FM could kill AM. (Armstrong
thought it would.) In addition, Sarnoff was pushing television. FM and TV
would inevitably compete for spectrum space and for consumer dollars.
Armstrong fine-tuned the technology, and
experimental FM broadcasts began. Time rhapsodized, “The enthusiasts say that they hear music
faithful to the topmost tweet, the bottommost woof; that speech seems to
come from the next chair, instead of the next telephone booth; that if an
announcer should scratch a match, listeners would hear it burst into flame;
that between numbers there is no hum, no crackle, just black, velvety
nothing.” The FCC assigned FM to the spectrum just below TV and
authorized commercial operation in 1940. The commission also ruled that
television broadcasts would use FM for sound. For the duration of
Armstrong’s patent, TV manufacturers would have to pay him
royalties.
FM took off. Hundreds of thousands of people bought
receivers. But after Pearl Harbor, the government halted production of FM
radios. And, like the Soviet Union, the FCC switched sides during the war.
Having earlier championed FM, the commission now skewered it.
On June 27, 1945, the FCC announced that
sunspots and atmospheric conditions were interfering with FM
broadcasts. An expected sunspot flare-up in 1949 and 1950 could
prove disastrous. The commission had a point, according to Dale Hatfield, a
telecommunications professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sunspots have caused static on channel 2 of analog TVs, and FM was lower on
the spectrum, where interference was likelier.
In response, the commission took three steps. First,
it transferred FM up to its current bandwidth and assigned most of the old
spectrum to television. Second, it ordered all FM stations to change to the
new frequencies by the end of 1946, a lightning-fast transition. (Digital
TV, by contrast, has been in the works for more than a decade.) Finally,
and inexcusably, the commission refused to let stations broadcast on both
old and new frequencies during the transition. (Currently, most TV stations
are broadcasting in digital as well as analog.)
Although RCA was on record opposing the change, many
people discerned the hand of Sarnoff. Build a better mousetrap, he once
remarked, and somebody will develop “a virulent poison which is death
on mice and there will be no longer any demand for mousetraps.”
The FCC said it wanted to boot FM
up-spectrum “before a considerable investment is made by
the listening public in receiving sets and by the broadcasters in
transmitting equipment.” In truth, a considerable investment had
already been made. As of mid-1945, there were 53 FM stations, and they were
broadcasting to a half-million receivers. The change of technical standards meant that
broadcasters’ and consumers’ equipment would become
obsolete soon and suddenly.
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the chair of the
FCC resigned to become general counsel at NBC, a division of RCA, after the
spectrum decision. It later emerged, too, that RCA had sent FCC
commissioners free televisions during the FM hearings.
Armstrong and others fought the FCC’s decisions
to no avail. In order to receive FM programming without interruption, a
consumer needed two receivers—one for the old bandwidth and one for
the new—or a receiver designed to get broadcasts on both bandwidths.
Broadcast stations had to retool their equipment, at an average cost of
more than $1 million apiece. Starting from scratch, most FM stations in the
postwar years simply simulcast AM broadcasts, a move that diminished
FM’s appeal to consumers and advertisers alike. “Despite its
later resurgence,” Hans Fantel wrote in The
New York Times in 1981, “FM never
fully recovered from this blow. Neither did Armstrong.”
The prediction that sunspots would devastate FM had
come from Kenneth Alva Norton, a War Department engineer. When the sunspots
flared, the interference on the old FM spectrum was minor. Armstrong asked
Norton if he’d made a mistake. “Oh, certainly,” Norton
replied. “I think that can happen frequently to people who make
predictions on the basis of partial information. It happens every
day.”
Armstrong’s troubles weren’t over. RCA
next took the position that his FM patents were invalid, so he wasn’t
entitled to royalties from the sale of televisions that used FM for sound.
Armstrong filed suit in 1948. During his deposition, David Sarnoff said of
Armstrong, “We were close friends. I hope we still are,” then
insisted that RCA engineers had invented FM.
On January 31, 1954, with the legal struggle dragging
on, Armstrong wrote a note to his wife, Marion: “God keep you and may
the Lord have mercy on my soul.” Wearing a suit, scarf, and gloves,
he jumped out the window of his 13th-floor apartment.
Shaken upon hearing the news, Sarnoff unthinkingly
told a friend, “I did not kill Armstrong.” A few months later,
RCA settled the lawsuit and agreed to pay Marion Armstrong $1 million. RCA
had licensed other companies to manufacture FM equipment, and those
companies continued to fight, but one judge after another upheld the
validity of the Armstrong patents. In the end, Marion Armstrong collected
another $10 million.
In the 1950s, another
change in standards loomed. Though not at first, Sarnoff ultimately won. No
fatalities were recorded.
The FCC in 1940 had cited “promising experiments
with color television”—namely, the color disc developed by
Peter Goldmark—but, heeding the NTSC’s
recommendation, declined to establish color standards. CBS tried again in
1946, but regulators adopted the same position they had in the 1930s
concerning black-and-white TV: “The Commission must be
satisfied not only that the system proposed will work but also that it is
as good as can be expected within a reasonable time to come.”
CBS color technology was incompatible with existing
black-and-white TVs. If the FCC adopted CBS standards, older
sets would continue to receive black-and-white programs but
not color ones. To see those programs, owners would have to buy either a
color TV or a converter projected to cost at least $100.
When CBS again asked the FCC to adopt its system, in
1949, RCA announced that it had almost perfected a compatible,
all-electronic version, without any “horse and buggy”
spinning discs. The FCC demanded a head-to-head comparison,
to Sarnoff’s consternation. On RCA prototypes at that point, colors
were produced separately and combined by a system of mirrors. The mirrors
were easily jostled, throwing the colors askew. On test day, Sarnoff later
recalled, “the monkeys were green, the bananas were blue, and
everyone had a good laugh.”
The prospect of obsolescence hadn’t troubled
Sarnoff in the past. With black-and-white TV, he had argued
that consumers deserved to enjoy the technology right away, even if the
equipment might soon be obsolete. The spectrum shift for FM, which
seemingly had Sarnoff’s backstage blessing, had rendered a
half-million receivers outdated. Now Sarnoff found himself in a
different position. RCA made TVs, and NBC broadcast to them. Compatibility
was essential.
“A compatible system in television,” Sarnoff told U.S. News and World Report, “is more or less the same
as a compatible marriage, where the husband and wife see the same thing at
the same time and don’t get into a lot of wavy motions.”
Like Sarnoff, the FCC flip-flopped.
“Obviously, it is essential that all receivers be capable of
receiving all transmissions,” the commission had said in 1941,
concerning black-and-white TV. Now it contended that, though
compatibility would be optimal, consumers wanted color and CBS had the
better technology. Goldmark’s disc became the official standard.
Sarnoff fought the FCC decision all the way to the Supreme Court,
unsuccessfully.
With color TV, as with FM a decade earlier, Sarnoff
profited from war. When the Korean War escalated in 1951, the government
barred nonmilitary uses of cobalt, a component in CBS color TVs.
Manufacture of the new TVs had to be postponed.
Meanwhile, RCA engineers continued working. By the
end of the war in 1953, RCA color was about the same as CBS color, and it
was compatible with black-and-white TVs. RCA achieved
compatibility by transmitting brightness and color separately.
Black-and-white sets got brightness; color sets got
both.
While developing compatible color, Sarnoff had also
slashed prices and sold black-and-white TVs as fast as he
could, in order to raise the political costs of an incompatible system.
“Every set we get out there makes it that much tougher on CBS,”
he said. The number of black-and-white TVs soared, from nine
million in 1950 to 23 million in 1953.
The NTSC reconvened, compared the two systems, and
recommended RCA color. In a gracious gesture, Peter Goldmark seconded the
motion to kill his invention. Late in 1953, the FCC adopted the RCA
standard. David Sarnoff had won again.
For the typical
technology, death comes slowly. Consumers chose VHS over Betamax two
decades ago, but individual Betamax players continued to work. Though Toshiba, maker of HD DVDs, surrendered to Sony and its Blu-ray
technology this winter in the high-definition DVD war, early
adopters who guessed wrong still have functioning machines. Prerecorded HD
DVDs may be few, and blank discs, like Betamax tapes, may disappear from
stores, but the life span of the players won’t be affected.
Consumer products—video recording
devices, vacuums, answering machines—die every day, but not
by the thousands or millions, all at once. Mass obsolescence can occur when
devices exchange information or value, and a central authority, usually the
government, alters the standards of exchange. On many subway systems today,
you can’t go anywhere without a fare card. Tokens, like prewar FM
receivers, have quit working. The old standards of exchange no longer
apply.
Decisions about standards frequently reflect the clout
of their proponents. “New machines are not accepted because they are,
in some abstract sense, ‘better,’ ” Steven Lubar, a
professor of American civilization at Brown University, writes in InfoCulture (1993). “They’re
accepted because they fill the needs of some individual or group; and they
are fought by people who feel that their economic or intellectual interests
are at stake.”
By some accounts, CBS’s system of the early
1950s produced sharper color than RCA’s but broke down more
frequently. “It’s very hard to say what’s a superior
technology,” Lubar observes. “What we think is superior in
retrospect is often what we’re used to, after a lot of money has been
invested in it.” Following this pattern, the superiority of digital
TV won’t be apparent to a lot of Americans next
February—quite the contrary—but most of
them will come around.
“We’re the pipes,” Sarnoff once said
of broadcasting. He helped set the specs for the analog pipes that have
served American TV for nearly 70 years. And no less important, he helped
decide what flowed through them. During his lifetime (he died in
1971), the choices were limited: Uncle Miltie or Aunt Bea, Car 54 or Agent
99, Captain Kirk or Colonel Klink. Sarnoff thought the future would be
different. The TV itself, he wrote, would be “a thin, flat-surface
screen that will be hung like a picture on the wall.” As for
programs, “every form of art and every type of entertainment will be
readily accessible in the home. The range and variety . . . will embrace
everything created by the human mind.”
On this, the televisionary’s vision was clear.
Today we have CNN, HBO, MTV, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, MPEG, Netflix,
and YouTube. Unwatched TiVo shows pile up like unread New Yorkers, network websites offer
full-length programs, and iPhone users peer at 3.5-inch screens. Program choices
are virtually limitless. That turns out to be bad news for Sarnoff’s
NBC, along with CBS and ABC—their audience share has
plummeted—but great news for viewers.
Some Americans, who have tuned out the urgency of the
FCC in favor of the urgency of CSI, will be startled by static at midnight on February 17.
For everybody else, digital TV will be pretty much the same as analog TV,
just a bit sharper, with a few more channels.
The digital changeover is revolutionary for
broadcasters. But for viewers, the revolution began years ago.
Printer
Friendly |
Stephen
Bates teaches in the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is a contributing editor of The Wilson Quarterly.
Reprinted from Spring
2008 Wilson Quarterly
This article may not be resold, reprinted,
or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written
permission from the author. For further reprint information, please
contact Permissions, The Wilson Quarterly, One Woodrow Wilson
Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.
Phone:202/691-4200
E-mail:wq@wilsoncenter.org
|
