However in Hollywood, that’s 8:30 in the morning – hardly a conducive time to have a pie thrown in your face! The New York Times reported, “Rounding up an audience of Hollywood tourists at has been a problem.” The show aired live in the east at 11:30am. Quickly, it became obvious there was a problem to be solved. Other times it was Studio D, a radio studio converted to television in NBC’s Radio City West at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street. Sometimes its home base was the El Capitan theater on Vine Street (years later it would become ABC’s Hollywood Palace). The daytime “T or C” began its daytime run on December 31st, 1956, originating live from Hollywood alternating from two locations. The show would make a young Bob Barker a household name and continue into the mid 1970’s. So four months after leaving the nighttime schedule, NBC tried again with a televised version, this time in daytime. But the radio version was still quite popular. So after two seasons it was removed from NBC’s evening schedule. The evening primetime television version never set the ratings world on fire. It relied on audience members to be the foils as they were asked unanswerable questions (Truth) and then put through some outrageous stunt (Consequences). The show was a television adaptation of a popular radio program of the same name. NBC had an audience participation show called “Truth or Consequences” that originally aired live from Burbank. Even before NBC started running TZD’s from tape (officially when Daylight Savings Time started in April, 1957), the technology was put to work in a new way. According to Broadcasting magazine issues 12/10/56, 12/17/56 and 12/24/56, it was installed – not in Burbank – but in NBC’s Hollywood headquarters. NBC received its first videotape machine on December 13 th, 1956. However, even before all the orders for machines earmarked for TZD were filled, the purpose of tape began to expand. No matter from which coast the programs originated, tape machines now rolled for the western time zones with kinescopes initially relegated to backup and eventually phased out altogether. Live was still the way the public would see their favorite shows if they lived in the east or the midwest. It allowed huge savings for the networks that would no longer be burdened by the expense of film stock and processing fees the kinescope process demanded. When the networks finally received their full complement of tape machines, the immediate planned use was as a tool for Time Zone Delay (TZD) with much improved video quality over kinescopes for the western states. Unless a show was originated on film, all programming continued to be live to the eastern and central time zones. ABC had three machines but they were based in Chicago.Īt the beginning, tape was considered a transmission device. A third one was sent to Camden, NJ, for RCA engineers to reverse engineer so RCA could enter the videotape marketplace. According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, CBS had five of them and NBC had two, all on the west coast. As late as November of 1957 there were only 13 videotape recorders in the United States. As the 1956-1957 television season got underway, the company was still filling initial orders for the machines. Ampex was overwhelmed at the reaction to their invention. Outside the last major production studio, Studio 11, built on the NBC Burbank lot as the audience lines up for the “Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno.”.Īmpex demonstrated their first prototype video tape recorder to the broadcasting industry at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in April of 1956. The last major studio expansion was Studio 11, built for the July, 1984, premiere of the soap opera “Santa Barbara.” Decades later, it became home to “The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno.” It was from Studio 11 that the final “Tonight” show closed out over four decades in California. NBC continued to build on the Burbank lot into the eighties. The look back on NBC Burbank’s sixty-two year history wouldn’t be complete without exploring some of the technical history NBC engineers made over the years. Recently, I wrote about the beginnings of NBC’s historic lot in Burbank as the Peacock network completed its move to nearby Universal Studios.
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