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Fascinating Collection of Television Station IDs circa 1951

Today on P S Dot Com: a fairly comprehensive survey of television station ID graphics circa 1951.  Widespread full-time telecasting did not take place in the US until 1948, so you are seeing the face of a relatively new industry here.   I realize that this post has little to do with sound, but television, as it is broadcast,  is at least 50% sonic; those of us who work in television are all-too-aware that we design programming for a distracted audience; I.E., programs and adverts are designed to deliver messages to audiences that can hear the set without necessarily seeing the screen.   The importance of television broadcasts in creating the sound-environment of the twentieth century is immense.  Anyway, here’s a trip back to the earliest days of mass-TV broadcasting in the US, and a fascinating look at how the early TV broadcasters saw themselves, as-it-were.  If anyone has a link to an online archive of the sounds that accompanied graphics such as these, please do let us know.

Many, many, many more follow: click the link below to READ ON…

 

 

 

chris

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  • Chris, these are great! Here's a website of old TV and radio photos and text that Preservation Sound readers might enjoy:
    http://www.akdart.com/vtr/vtr.html
    Note that all of those photos were saved from a dumpster, and because the website owner was willing to spend some cash to have them scanned and then go to a lot of trouble putting together that excellent site, none of it was lost to history.

    I just noted something interesting, hopefully some of the broadcasting old-timers will comment. Why did the Dallas-Fort Worth market have both K and W call letters for the TV stations? WFAA and KDFW, plus I think other K and other W stations? What are W stations doing west of the Mississippi?

    -- Tom Fine

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