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SATELLITE BROADCASTING

International Broadcasting

On 10 July 1962 the international broadcasting of television signals came closer to reality with the launch of Telstar 1, a fifty-million-dollar communications satellite owned and operated by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). That same day a picture of an American flag flapping in the breeze was beamed from a television station in Andover, Maine, to Europe. Eleven days later a consortium of the three major television networks broad-cast a "picture album" of the United States—the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a herd of buffalo grazing near Mount Rushmore—received by television broadcasters in Great Britain and the European Broad-cast Union. The Europeans transmitted pictures of the Roman coliseum, the Louvre, and the British Museum to the United States.

Synchronous Orbit,

One year later, on 10 July 1963, CBS showed the potential uses of transatlantic broad-casts when it showed a program called Town Meeting of the World, featuring former president Dwight D, Eisenhower, European Common Market founder Jean Monnet, West German parliamentary leader Heinrich von Brentano, and former British prime minister Anthony Eden. Two weeks later the first synchronous-orbit satellite, in step with the rotation of earth, was launched.

Early Bird.

In 1965 the first commercial communications satellite, Early Bird, was placed in orbit, The same consortium of broadcasters that broke in Tehtar 1 collaborated in the first Early Bird relay. Martin Luther King, Jr., Pope Paul VI, French nuclear scientists, U.S. Marines patrolling in the Dominican Republic, and Houston heart-bypass surgeons were shown across the ocean. The following day American networks were switching so frequently from country to country that John Horn, television critic for the New York Herald Tribune, suggested that they were acting like a "bunch of kids with a new kite."

Dream

Fred W. Friendly, president of CBS News, issued an instruction to his company that, like so many based on principle, was forgotten in the rush for entertainment dollars:

Now that the Bird is working for us, CBS News must now make sure it does not find itself working for the Bird.… There is a natural tendency to show what-we can do physically with the satellite, but it is what we do with it as a news instrument that will distinguish CBS News. Let others turn it into a plaything for bland features.… Hard news still counts most.