By late January 1945, the end of World War II finally seemed in sight. American business leaders began thinking about introducing products delayed by the war. The most anticipated was nylon stockings, which debuted in 1939 only to have the new fiber diverted to military applications. Another was television, which had entranced visitors at the 1939 World’s Fair. But the new medium was a much tougher sell than high-tech hosiery.
‘Television presents a vicious triangle’, JJ Nance, a Zenith Radio Corp executive explained to Wall Street analysts. Television shows were far more expensive to make than radio programs. Producers needed advertising revenue to cover the costs. But advertisers demanded large audiences. ‘We can’t get a mass audience’, Nance said, ‘until we have provided the American people with assured continuous entertainment, pleasing enough to stimulate the buying of receivers by the million’. Hence the vicious triangle: attracting viewers required programs, which required advertising, which required viewers...
It’s a dilemma every new technology platform faces – only more so. To catch on, television needed to sell hardware, create content, and find revenue. Few contemporary platforms have to do all three. Most build on an installed base of hardware. Social media gets its content free from users. In theory, TV might have paid for programming with a license fee on sets, like the tax that still funds the BBC. But Americans, accustomed to free, ad-supported radio programming over public airwaves, fiercely resisted any such suggestion.
A magazine advertisement by Radio Corporation of America announcing that television broadcasting in New York City had begun.
Yet just a decade after Nance’s speech, two thirds of American homes had a TV set, including 78 percent of those in cities. As early as 1948, public housing officials were already debating whether tenants in subsidized apartments should be allowed sets and antennas. Television was one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history.
To escape the vicious triangle, broadcasters exploited ready-made productions, complete with their own stages, fan bases, and well-established stars: sports. Showcasing athletic competition was the new medium’s killer app. ‘For the next few years, at least, sports coverage will be far and away the most important single element in television programming’, the sports manager for Chicago’s WGN station wrote in 1948. ‘It’s a safe bet that up to 50 per cent of television hours, both live shows and films, will be in the field of athletics’.