When television was new, the term video distinguished it from radio, a similar sounding word, out of which television grew as a commercial medium of broadcasting, and against which it was understood as a technological improvement. In the 1940s and 1950s, TV was synonymous with video, and the five-letter word fit well in newspaper headlines, where it often appeared in stories about broadcasting. This persisted for several decades, though the peak of interchangeable usage was in the early 1950s, as Google’s Ngram for video in American English sources suggests. Video’s bump in the early 1950s coincides with the emergence of TV as a mass medium. (The upward slope beginning in the later 1960s suggests that the term gained wider usage later on when it would distinguish video recording from live television broadcasting; fig. 2.1.) The New York Times broadcasting column in these early days of TV was called “Radio-Video.” Articles in the popular and trade press would use video the way we might today use TV, referring to video cameras, video stations, video sets, video studios, video personalities, video programs, video technique, and video audiences. When sponsors left radio for television in the early 1950s, the news reported this in terms of “video’s impact on radio.”1
FIGURE 2.1 Google’s Ngram for video (case sensitive) in English from 1930–1980.
Video in this phase was not only distinct from radio but also parallel to it. Radio referred to the transmission of sound via electromagnetic waves to receivers, most typically in the home in the case of commercial broadcasts. Video did the same thing, using similar technologies (e.g., transmitters and receivers), but with pictures. Orrin Dunlap’s 1932 volume The Outlook for Television notes that the vision half of the word television comes from the Latin video, “I see.”2 The earliest quotation in its OED entry, from a 1937 issue of Printer’s Ink Monthly, defines video as “the sight channel in television, as opposed to audio.” Thus the substitution of vi for ra in the words video and radio indicate a common meaning of instantaneous communication across significant distance of an electronic signal, and of commercial broadcasting. Calling the television a set indicates an aggregation of technologies, and video reception and display was one of these.3 At the time of TV’s introduction to the consumer market, the New York Times described how television works by explaining that the “video component” of a TV signal was composed of the broadcast of scan lines beamed by an electron gun. This would be joined by a sound channel, as in radio, a separate signal from the image or video channel.4
Television’s cultural status in its early years was a product not only of how TV was made and watched but of the hopes for the new medium and its idealization as a technology with the potential to overcome some of the deficiencies of existing media. Most centrally, the ideal of television was as a medium of immediacy and directness, making possible the instantaneous transmission of events bringing widely dispersed audiences together. Because of its place in the home and the size of its screen, and because of its status as an improvement on radio, television was regarded as an intimate medium capable of conveying honest and true representations to the individual viewer. And because of its addition of image to sound, television was seen as the culmination of decades of technological effort to transmit events live from one place to another, making possible a form of communication distinct and in some ways more impressive than earlier forms such as theater, movies, and radio. The fact that television’s picture was regarded as wanting in comparison to cinema’s helped promote the newer medium’s liveness and immediacy as particularly televisual aesthetic virtues.5 Early television was thus understood in relation to these forms in particular, and often in rather techno-utopian terms. Gilbert Seldes claimed in 1950 that by combining “sight and sound immediacy” with color and eventually stereoscopic images, TV promised to become a “platonic ideal of communication.”6
The techno-utopian connotations of television were among the meanings associated with the new medium in Captain Video and His Video Rangers, a notable early television program, which aired nightly at 7 P.M. on the DuMont Network from 1949 to 1955. A science fiction series broadcasting live on a modest budget, Captain Video might often be remembered as much for its laughably cheap production values and its commercial appeal to children as a market for tie-in merchandise like space toys and apparel as for the ideas it expressed about the video medium. But as David Weinstein argues, Captain Video represented post–World War II ideals of belief in the application of scientific knowledge as a way of overcoming the devastating military struggles of the past, represented in the figure of the Captain as a space explorer and fighter.7 By naming the character after the medium on which he appeared, the show’s creators were not merely establishing an identity for Captain Video as a TV personality and drawing on the novelty of TV. The Video in his name also spoke of the potential for television to be part of a new world of scientific progress and exploration. In these years when television was new enough to be considered magical, like something out of the world of science fiction, TV representations of space and of the futuristic gear of space travel (actually refashioned from Wanamaker’s department store stock such as automotive parts) implicitly conveyed the medium’s power to overcome old limitations of time, space, and vision. Within the narrative of the program, Captain Video communicates via an antenna atop his house, employing one tool called the “opticon scillometer,” a telescope-like device that gives him the power to see any and all things, and another called the “remote carrier beam,” a display resembling a TV set that permits communication with his agents in remote locations. Video, as repurposed in this representation, was not merely an improvement on radio but a revolutionary and futuristic technology leading toward human achievement and progress. Its power of making seen the unseen and connecting people across vast distances was connected to its mission of establishing institutions of commercial broadcasting, which was the ambition of early networks such as DuMont. Thus liveness and associated ideals promoted as TV’s essential qualities were not merely technical descriptions but also expressions of hopes for a new technology growing alongside hopes for postwar society.
These ideals were also figured in relation to other media and their institutions, typically understood in terms of their own social implications and the anxieties associated with them. The liveness and instantaneity of TV gave video its earliest identity, and it was one constructed in opposition to the dominant mass medium of entertainment in the years leading up to TV’s introduction: the movies, which meant Hollywood. As William Boddy has shown, critics of the early 1950s regularly opposed television’s aesthetics with cinema’s, and the contrast was based not only on technological criteria but also on the reputation of the movies and the American film industry.8 In the account of cultural elites, Hollywood was characterized by its cynical assembly line production of mediocre entertainment for an undiscerning mass audience. Television, they hoped, would do better by avoiding the conformity and commercialism of the movies and upholding a higher artistic standard in its programming. Video was idealized in terms of cultural uplift and improvement, of escaping some of the deficiencies of the most popular commercial entertainment of the day. The location of the broadcasting industry in New York rather than Los Angeles and the model of theatrical naturalism that television would borrow from the legitimate stage were factors in the hopeful intentions of critics and network programmers to distinguish the new medium and make clear its aspirations to greater cultural legitimacy. RCA’s president David Sarnoff proclaimed that “television drama will develop in novel directions, using the best of theater and motion pictures, and building a new art-form based on these.”9
The idea that television’s essence would be its live broadcasts was worked out especially in tension with the use of recorded (i.e., filmed) rather than live programs on the TV networks in the early and mid-1950s. The idea of live broadcasting’s superiority, and its status as the essence of broadcasting, carried over from radio practice. Before television’s ascent to mass medium status, the radio networks placed a stigma on recorded programming, and quarreled with talent, most famously Bing Crosby, over the issue.10 But radio networks did often use electrical transcriptions, the sound-on-disc recording format that preceded magnetic tape, for broadcasts of recorded programs (including Crosby’s, the first regularly scheduled recorded network program), and many stations relied on them extensively.11 Beginning in the 1920s, however, the most powerful interests in radio had established live and simultaneous national network broadcasts as the most legitimate use of radio, what Alexander Russo in his historical account describes as “the best and most natural form of the medium.”12 Recorded programming was sometimes banned and sometimes regarded as fraudulent. Radio stations announced when recordings were being broadcast to make clear that they were not live, reinforcing a norm and an ideal of liveness. This served the interests of the national networks, who alone had access to technology (AT&T’s network of lines spanning the continent) enabling national live broadcasting.
The elevation of live over filmed television broadcasts was one of many ways in which television carried on practices established in network radio in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Television critics in the early 1950s considered filmed TV shows to be aesthetically inferior to live teleplays and elevated the live anthology drama, with its big-name writers of New York theater backgrounds, as the model of artistic achievement for the medium. It was on these terms that the notion of the 1950s as a golden age of television was established. Like radio, however, much of television at this time was made up of broadcasts of recorded programs. Film and later tape eliminated the unpredictability of live television (including live ads), allowed for the tricks of cinema such as miniature, slow motion, and process shots, and better accommodated shooting on location and changing sets and costumes. With film, a TV show could be “planned, rehearsed, staged, edited, previewed and telecast with professional perfection.”13 By the 1960s the live drama had been cast aside by new formats that were more economically rational for producers, networks, stations, and advertisers.
Still, the identification of television’s purpose and essence as live transmission has endured long after that period, becoming a founding myth and abiding ideology.14 A plaintive New York Times story in 1978 about the shift of many genres of live television such as news, sports, and talk shows from live production to videotape insisted that “the best television has always been live television.”15 Writing in the early 1980s, John Ellis claimed that the television broadcast image generally appears as if immediate and live, particularly in comparison to cinema, even in genres such as soap opera that make no overt claim to liveness. “The notion that broadcast TV is still live haunts the medium; even more so does the sense of immediacy of the image,” Ellis argues. He describes this immediacy as a “sense of the perpetual present.”16
The video medium in the 1950s was in a period of establishment, wherein critics and networks were working out ideas about values of the technology and its uses in relation to other media of the time. Jack Gould, the New York Times TV columnist and among the period’s most respected elite critics, railed against the networks’ use of recorded programming, calling the choice to rely on such fare a “colossal boner.” Under the headline “A Plea for Live Video,” he reasoned that filmed programs had a diminished picture and sound quality, and that they were lacking in a “trueness” that is the “heart of TV.” Previously recorded programs aimed to be little more than a lesser version of what one might find at the neighborhood cinema, but live video—“true television”—would offer “the intangible excitement and sense of anticipation that is inherent in the performance which takes place at the moment one is watching.”17
The liveness of television, as Elana Levine writes, has often been used to distinguish different kinds of TV programming in terms of their aesthetic quality. Ideas about the ontology of video images and their transmission have often been caught up, she argues, in “struggles over distinction and cultural worth that have long been part of television history.”18 The identity of a medium is often tied to the status of its most highly valued examples, as was clearly the case in the early years of TV as a mass medium. The identification of liveness as the essence of video would soon give way to quite different conceptions of the video medium as technological and cultural changes prompted revisions to its status, to the functions and meanings ascribed to it, as the next chapter will show. But in its initial stage, the live transmission of images was central to video’s identity and to the work of distinguishing television from other media.