Bert might enjoy reading about the 1952 FCC spectrum allocation decision - "the
Sixth Report and Order" - caused the death of the fourth network, DuMont. And
the reality that cable made UHF a viable medium...
DuMont proposed much larger market coverage areas for VHF to allow for four
commercial TV networks. From The Political Spectrum:
The alternative position, favored by the larger networks, particularly CBS,
would “provide each community with at least one television broadcast
service.” The localists knew that increasing the number of cities with three
TV stations would force the FCC to leave fewer markets with four or more.
Consider two rival plans for the northeastern United States.
Plan One: The Commission assigns licenses to six of the twelve VHF channels
(2–13), locating them in New Haven, Connecticut, and allowing them sufficient
power to reach homes from Boston to Philadelphia. The stations all transmit
from one spot in New Haven so that the every-other-channel allocation is
sufficient to eliminate almost all cross-station interference even on
inexpensive TV tuners. This approach allows everyone living in the Boston–New
York–Philadelphia corridor to receive five commercial stations and one
noncommercial station, with distinct programs on each. But the stations are
regional, not local.
Plan Two: The Commission ensures that there are TV stations in Philadelphia,
Trenton, Albany, New York City, New Haven, Hartford, Manchester, Providence,
and Boston. Putting stations in more markets means that, to mitigate
interference between them, the FCC imposes lower power limits, restricting
how far signals can travel, and leaves many local channels idle—“ taboo” in
Commission terminology. If Channel 4 is on the air in Boston, it is probably
blacked out in Providence, Hartford, Albany, and Manchester. These taboo
channels shrink the TV dial, but more cities have stations. DuMont pleaded
for Plan One. But the FCC chose Door No. 2.
It is apparent what NBC, CBS, and ABC got from this deal. But “localism,” the...
public interest justification, was not the result. In 1952, the Commission’s
Sixth Report called for some 2,002 TV stations, 1,433 (72 percent) of them
UHF. Yet a decade later, there were just 102 UHF stations on the air—a
decline from the high-water mark in 1954, when 121 operated. Very few of the
small-market UHF stations survived to broadcast at all.
If the Commission did not actually promote localism, what did it do?
Northwestern University law and economics professor Matthew Spitzer commented
that “the FCC’s primary goal appears to have been to place at least one
over-the-air service in every large community. This corresponds neatly to
placing broadcasting stations in as many congressional districts as
possible.” 17 The government’s preference for wide distribution of federal
largesse is well known. An old Washington joke has it that the optimal
weapons system is a tank that may or may not fire but is manufactured in all
435 congressional districts.
The All-Channel Receiver Act (which the FCC proposed to Congress and lobbied
for) mandated that, starting in 1964, all TV sets sold in the U.S. include
tuners that covered both the VHF and UHF TV bands. Yet UHF broadcasts
remained inferior when viewed on standard television receivers. Even when
nearly all TV sets in use contained all-channel tuners, UHF stations
languished. A 1978 U.S. Senate report announced: “The intent of the
All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962 has not been realized. UHF television
broadcasting remains sorely disadvantaged within the national television
system.”
In response, the FCC formed a new task force, which in 1980 reported that...
“neither changes in broadcast power nor in receiver performance could be
expected to greatly reduce the UHF reception disadvantage.” The Commission
created, and until 2016 observed, a “UHF discount.” When determining how many
broadcast TV licenses a company owned, for purposes of limiting ownership
concentration in a policy crafted in 2003, it counted a UHF station as just
one-half of a VHF station.
Why did the FCC call for the All-Channel Receiver Act? In the 1950s, the UHF
band had proven an economic killing field. A 1959 FCC report noted that
nearly one-half of the 369 UHF construction permits the Commission had issued
had been given back to the government, and that 90 of the 165 UHF stations
that had gone on the air had subsequently failed. This carnage was a
political problem for regulators. While protecting the Big Three commercial
networks in the 1952 TV allocation table, the FCC had always pointed to the
availability of UHF channels as fertile ground for competitive growth. The
space it had reserved for thousands of UHF outlets formed the crux of the
agency’s argument that it had not simply done the bidding of the major
networks.
But with few UHF stations on the air and fewer still offering popular
programming, customers were refusing to buy TV sets that included, at a
higher price, UHF tuners—so manufacturers stopped making them. The fraction
of televisions equipped to receive UHF signals fell from around 20 percent in
1953 to just 6 percent in 1961. Consumers resisted paying for an extra
function that did not really function.
The FCC claimed its position was a defense not of the powerful and highly...
profitable commercial TV networks, but of fledgling UHF operators too weak to
resist market forces. The “unique” all-channel TV tuner mandate in 1962 had
established that “Congress and the American public have staked a great deal
on the development of UHF.” If unregulated cable TV systems brought new
competitive content into a market, they could “siphon” audiences. If a cable
system “should destroy a broadcasting operation, the CATV would not
thereafter ‘render the required service,’” including the local, educational,
news, and public affairs programs vital to the health of democracy. New rules
were thus needed “to prevent or ameliorate adverse impact of CATV
competition.”
Incumbent TV station profits had morphed into a proxy for the “public
interest.” The benefits of pro-consumer competition were acknowledged—“ CATV
. . . makes possible the provision of a variety of program choices,
particularly the three full network services, to many persons”—but instantly
dismissed. Cable TV was “a service which, technically, cannot be made
available to many people and which, practically, will not be available to
many others.” The prediction fared poorly when tested in actual markets, but
it provided justification enough for the Commission to then craft rules to
“ameliorate the risk that the burgeoning CATV industry” posed for “television
broadcast service, both existing and potential.”
From 1965 through 1970, the FCC aggressively discouraged the upstart rival by
imposing federal franchises and “anti-siphoning rules.” The agency imposed
arcane, detailed mandates, “assum[ ing] the characteristics of a central
planner,” banning CATV systems from featuring:
• movies that had been in theatrical release more than two years before the
cablecast;
• sporting events that had been telecast in the community on a
nonsubscription basis during the previous two years; and
• series programming of any type.
The “traffic cop” for the airwaves was now prohibiting episodic TV programs
over wires. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Duck Dynasty, and Game of Thrones would
have been illegal in the 1960s.
Minow claimed credit. His FCC, he said, had rescued UHF TV stations from
oblivion by lobbying Congress to pass the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962
and then working with the Kennedy administration to launch satellite
communications. The fiftieth anniversary of the “vast wasteland” speech was
yet another forum for such assertions, and journalists eagerly repeated
Minow’s boasts.
In fact, the FCC—under Minow and for years afterward—did not promote cable
but aggressively moved to block it. The All-Channel Receiver Act did not
produce net benefits for consumers and did not rescue UHF. Only after cable
deregulation reversed Minow’s policies in the late 1970s and early 1980s was
a fourth broadcast network, Fox, able to form, in 1986. That was precisely
because so many UHF stations were made viable via cable retransmission. The
Spanish-language services Univision and Telemundo also became successful
national networks as cable, unleashed, delivered new life for UHF.
