Radio: Screen Meets Screen

To the average U. S. citizen the promise of television means the ultimate possibility of going to the cinema in his own home, of seeing newsreels at the moment news happens. To Paramount Pictures executives it meant much the same. thing last August when they bought half interest in Allen B. DuMont Laboratories Inc., laid plans to take a potential competitor into cinema’s camp.

Last week Stanton Griffis, chairman of Paramount’s executive committee, served notice that his company had not only jumped on television’s bandwagon but was out to do the driving. He announced that telecasting from DuMont’s transmitter now under construction at Montclair, N. J. would start in January, that Paramount had taken on the job of making cinema shorts, other films to be televised on the DuMont shows. But DuMont receiving sets are already being offered for sale in Manhattan stores for $395 ($150 to $250 is the reported mass production price). For demonstration they receive RCA’s experimental transmissions from the Empire State Building.*

To bring U. S. television out of the laboratory, engineers have several tough nuts to crack. DuMont’s head man, Allen B. DuMont, boasts that he holds the broken shells of three of the toughest. Hitherto each television station has been using six megacycles, almost six times the total wavelength space filled by 745 licensed stations in the U. S. broadcast band. The DuMont transmitter has been reduced to a relatively modest three-mega-cycle sprawl. The DuMont transmitting system is said to throw its pictures well beyond television’s paltry 50-mile effective range. This it has done in the laboratory through its ability to use longer wave lengths which are effective beyond the horizonwide limit of television’s usual ultrashort waves, hopes to reproduce the stretch in actual telecasting. And for DuMont receivers it is claimed that no likely changes in television standards can make their newest designs obsolete.

As evidence of television’s need for union with cinema Cinemagnet Griffis pointed to the great cost of hooking up television stations by cable. Cheaper procedure is that of filming television programs, sending the films to transmitters. His additional argument for canned television: “Televised movies must excel any performance acted directly for the television transmitter.”

*RCA plans to convert its experiments into a regular program service in April, has not yet put any television receivers on public sale.