
Early Color Television - brudgers
https://www.earlytelevision.org/color_tv_cooper.html
======
CamperBob2
This is hilarious. In a meeting to decide whose proprietary color TV system to
mandate for industry adoption, the FCC required each of the three competing
companies to demonstrate their receivers in operation alongside their rivals,
each playing the same video content of their own respective choice. RCA's
system didn't work so well, so they cheated by planting an engineer in the
audience who would remotely adjust the hue control as needed. FTA:

 _CBS produced a "Woman's Program" with an auburn haired hostess. Well, she
had auburn hair on rehearsal day and as RCA would be staffing each of its
receivers with a "hue control engineer" who would make constant (as required)
adjustments to the receivers during the telecasts, notes were passed from the
WNBW studio to the engineers as to what colors to expect and therefore
indirectly how to adjust the hue controls._

 _But CBS pulled a fast one - on the day of the actual telecast, the same lady
appeared with what George Brown described as, "a ghastly shade of pink hair."
Naturally the RCA engineers at the receiving site thought their TV sets had
gone whacko and immediately began twisting the hue control to compensate. When
they somehow managed to turn ghastly pink hair into auburn, the lady had a
green face. The FCC personnel watching this without knowledge of the
subterfuge dismissed the entire RCA display as, "RCA is out of adjustment -
again."_

------
grawprog
> 7) CBS was on record as NOT favoring the commercialization of TV at that
> time citing a list of reasons (to follow). Virtually every other firm in
> electronics was in favor of TV being authorized for commercial operation.

It's hard to even begin to imagine what things would be like if television
hadn't been authorized for commercial use. The world would likely be vastly
different though.

------
mrgriscom
I'm quite interested in the subject matter here but jesus that was long-
winded...

~~~
vibrolax
It was long-winded. However, the intersection of raw technology, consumer
product manufacturing and distribution, show business, and government
regulation makes for a complicated story.

I can't think of anything in the modern era as kludgy as mechanical sequential
color TV systems making it into 'production'.

~~~
lucas_membrane
Recirculating ball steering?

In the world of color, remember ansi.sys ? That was about 40 years after NTSC.
Imagine how well color TV would have worked if the color information had been
sent by embedded escape codes.

In the over-the-air broadcasting world, there are all those sub-carriers
riding on just about all the FM signals making background monkey-chatter for
each other.

And before multiplexing by frequency came along, there were those center-tap
methods of sending three signals on two lines, seven signals on four lines
(did anyone ever get it to work for fifteen signals on eight lines)?

