Stuff I've Been Forced to Learn About Early TV: The FCC screws up again

TV started for realz in 1946, though the technological legwork had been going on since the 1920s. When RCA pulled its "sell TVs and then blame it on the consumers when we corner the market in VHF" stunt with the FCC, the company got almost no blowback from its behavior.

In fact, the FCC decided to encourage more TV competition in 1948 by doing the obvious: giving out more rights to broadcast channels in popular city markets.

Unfortunately, they did this by altering the engineers' recommendations on how far apart broadcasting stations should be when they were on the same or adjacent channels. Where before stations on the same channel had to be a couple hundred miles apart, and 150 miles apart if they were adjacent channels (i.e., channel 2 and channel 3), the FCC decided to reduce those mileages, to 150 and 75, respectively.

According to reports, the Detroit stations experienced interference within two miles of their broadcasting center, thanks to Cleveland.

This caused the FCC to panic. Even though it was obvious -- at least to the engineers, who had apparently resigned themselves to never being listened to again -- what had caused the malfunctions in TV stationing, the FCC decided to halt the approval of all new TV stations until the matter was cleared up.

Because the FCC was a government agency, that took four years.

In April of 1952, the FCC finally lifted the "freeze" on new TV stations; the committee also decided to allow for UHF broadcasting, opening some markets as exclusively UHF while supplementing already-existing markets with established VHF stations, with a mix of UHF stations to complement them.

Unfortunately, the networks that had a toehold in the most desirable urban markets when the freeze had begun (NBC, CBS, occasionally ABC) had turned those into chokeholds on the markets most likely to sustain competition, like New York, Chicago and L.A. They held unmitigated dominance in those urban markets the entire four years, and with most markets only able to sustain two TV stations, NBC and CBS in particular had locked down most of the country in a duopoly that lasted through the 50s.

In addition, consumer demand for TVs -- in the postwar era that gave us the consumer culture we dwell in so fondly today, when disposable income demanded to be disposed of -- had increased exponentially, and in the absence of already-established UHF stations, those buyers were buying VHF receivers. UHF stations were doomed from the get-go in mixed markets, and they wouldn't recover as competitors until the All Channels Act of 1961.

All of this contributed to the downfall of early TV's ill-fated, fourth major network, DuMont, in 1956. Of the markets open at the beginning of the FCC freeze, only about 11 could sustain three major networks, ABC being the third, and only two or three markets could sustain four networks. DuMont had no choice but to expand into the financially ridiculous ultra-high frequencies after the freeze, and the network went down along with countless independent stations.

In other words, the FCC, spawned itself by a two-party system, inadvertently stamped out competition at just the right time in network TV history to practically guarantee we'd be limited to two or three major networks. (And ABC saved itself from certain doom only thanks to some fancy footwork poo-poo'ed by contemporary critics in the late 50's.)

It wasn't until cable began in the 1970s that all was right in the world once more.

It's not so bad, though; you should hear what the same FCC did to FM radio.

I'd tell you, but it would keep you up at night with the sheer stupidity.