Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own. Network radio was still the dominant mass entertainment medium. If you wanted to listen to Bing Crosby or “The Quiz Kids,” you tuned in to their radio programs. While there were roughly 85 million radios in use throughout America, there were 1.3 million TV sets, 750,000 of which were on the East Coast. Television was still a pricey toy. A console set with a 16-inch picture tube cost $695 in 1949—half the price of a new car. Every TV station in the country was operating in the red, and NBC ran its fledgling TV network at a loss of $13,000 a day, $116,000 in today’s dollars.
WSJ Sightings: New-Media Crisis of 1949 (via bliptvad) (via evangotlib) (via mikehudack)
