Who killed captain video? How the FCC strangled a TV pioneer

Reason, March, 2005 by Glenn Garvin

DuMont was free to seek affiliation agreements with other stations. But its disadvantages were even greater when it came to affiliation. About 80 percent of television station owners also owned radio stations, and they were not willing to risk losing profitable network radio shows by linking their TV channels to DuMont, which had no radio programming to offer.

The killing thrust was yet to come, though. In 1945, with only a handful of TV stations on the air, the Fee--whether through cupidity or stupidity is unclear--had ruled that only 13 channels in the very-high-frequency (VHF) portion of the broadcast spectrum would be set aside for television. (That was later reduced to 12.) The commission's blunder was soon apparent. As more stations began setting up shop, their signals banged into one another. First stations in the same city were for the most part prohibited from broadcasting on adjacent channels (for example, 8 and 9), which cut the available channels in half. That didn't solve the problem; stations as far as 150 miles from one another suffered interference if they broadcast on the same channel. That effectively limited most metropolitan areas to three channels--meaning one network would lose out. Almost inevitably, that would be DuMont.

DuMont offered a plan that would have at the very least doubled the number of TV channels available in each city: The network proposed using VHF channels in some cities and the new UHF (ultra-high-frequency) channels (14 and higher) in others. Instead, the FCC decided to mix the two frequencies in each city, leaving established stations where they were and assigning newcomers to UHF. But that required viewers to buy an expensive new tuner and antenna to watch the UHF stations, and as DuMont predicted, most of them didn't. Why bother, when they could go on watching VHF for free?

The result was that just seven cities in America had four or more TV stations, and DuMont was frozen out. By 1952 its affiliates could reach only about 40 percent of American television sets. The network's final three years of operation were a tortuous end game, with DuMont selling parts of itself to stay afloat until there was nothing left.

Weinstein pulls no punches in describing the FCC's connivance with the dominant networks or the lethal effect it had on DuMont. But he also quotes without objection network executives such as ABC's Len Goldenson saying there was barely enough advertising to support three networks. That's the fox denouncing henhouse overpopulation. At the time the FCC was sticking a regulatory shiv in DuMont's back, television was taking off like one of Captain Video's runaway rockets. In 1947 the annual production of TV sets was 160,000; by 1950 it was 7.3 million. Advertisers could no more have ignored that than the Titanic could have ignored the iceberg.

Weinstein's book closes with the demise of DuMont. He would have had to continue for another three decades to give it a happy ending. The FCC continued to scamper alongside the feet of its network masters for another 30 years, a vigilant watchdog against competition. It battled cable television ("pay TV," the commission derisively labeled it) for years. In presatellite days, cable systems related their signals via microwave; the FCC denied licenses to microwave companies that did business with cable. Even when the outright ban was lifted, cable was blocked from the 100 biggest TV markets and forbidden to offer original programming. The FCC was forthright in saying it didn't want cable "siphoning off" viewers from the broadcast networks.