The 1950s, When the Big Three Networks Had an Advantage Built Right Into America’s TV Sets
It wasn’t legislation that limited American television to three national networks – it was the FCC
This article summarizes several of the key points in Lesson 8: The Distinctly American Style of Broadcast Television, which is part of Broadband Breakfast's online course, "150 Years of American Telecommunications." A new lesson will be released every Monday.
On New Year’s Day 1954, the smallest of America’s four national television networks, DuMont, took over a Kansas City station, including its equipment and a five-year lease on its property, for $1. By the end of February, the station went dark.
The Kansas City station, KCTY, set to broadcast on channel 25, but television sets of the era had a dial with only channels 2 through 13. Watching KCTY meant having to buy a converter box, an add-on tuner for the higher channels, and often an outdoor antenna.
Viewers had little reason to buy either, because three stations on the regular dial already carried the other national networks: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).
Kansas City-area households owned nearly 400,000 sets built for the regular dial, according to a DuMont statement reported by the industry’s weekly trade magazine, Broadcasting. Nearly all of those viewers, the company said, were “reluctant to spend additional sums.”
“Sound business judgment forces us to the decision,” television set manufacturer and network founder Allen B. DuMont said in announcing the closure.
KCTY’s failure traced back to Washington. Federal regulators had licensed new stations on channels most American sets could not tune, while the channels every set could receive already carried the established networks.
Existing stations gained nearly four years
The newcomers’ disadvantage began years earlier. On Sept. 30, 1948, the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that licenses broadcasters, stopped approving new television stations since existing stations were interfering with one another.
Two stations broadcasting on the same channel could interfere with each other’s signals if located too close together. The commission halted new approvals to revise its allocation of channels among cities. Stations authorized before the freeze could continue building and broadcasting.
Regulators expected the pause to last six months. Technical disputes and the Korean War stretched it to April 1952, according to an encyclopedia published by the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. Applications left waiting passed 700.
SThe freeze gave stations already on the air a head start in securing network affiliations. Networks relied on contracts with local stations to distribute their programs, and those affiliates’ combined reach determined the audience they could offer advertisers.
Before television, NBC and CBS ran the country’s two leading radio networks, and that head start helped them sign the available stations first. When the freeze began, 80 percent of the metropolitan areas with television had only one or two stations, writes television news historian Charles Ponce de Leon.
The new channels started without an audience
The commission ended the freeze with a formal ruling, the Sixth Report and Order, issued April 14, 1952. It kept the 12 regular-dial channels, known as the very high frequency band, or VHF. It also opened 70 channels, numbered 14 through 83, on the ultra high frequency band, or UHF.
For station owners, that difference constrained advertising revenue. An established VHF station could offer advertisers an audience already equipped to watch, while a UHF newcomer had to build one among households willing to buy converters.
The commission assigned VHF and UHF stations to the same cities, acknowledging that the arrangement could “temporarily handicap operations in the new UHF band,” according to a 2010 review of agency decisions by commission staff.
UHF stations struggled throughout the 1950s. Of the 165 that began broadcasting from 1952 through 1959, 55 percent shut down, the review reports.
DuMont had described KCTY’s difficulties as “peculiar to Kansas City.” Similar failures across the country pointed to a broader problem.
DuMont’s Pittsburgh station showed the other side
In Pittsburgh, DuMont owned the city’s only advertiser-supported station on the regular dial, WDTV. Its profits helped cover the network’s losses in other cities.
A different channel plan could have made room for more networks. The commission wanted as many towns as possible to have a station of their own, so it spread channels thinly. The staff review concludes that fewer, more powerful stations, each covering a wider region, could have supported as many as seven national networks.
The channel plan was not DuMont’s only problem. Unlike NBC and CBS, it had no radio business to cover its television losses.
Short of cash, DuMont sold WDTV to the electrical manufacturer Westinghouse in December 1954 for $9.75 million. The DuMont network’s final broadcast aired in August 1956.
The freeze and the 1952 channel plan shaped American television for three decades. NBC, CBS and ABC dominated with the channels every set could receive. No law ever required three networks.
Read Lesson 8: The Distinctly American Style of Broadcast Television, for more on these decisions into educational television and cable’s challenge to local broadcasters.
