Radio: Platters for the Pacific

Firmest rule of network broadcasting is “no recordings.” Reasons given: 1) when NBC set the style 13 years ago, recordings (“platters”) were pretty scratchy; 2) the radio audience likes programs better fresh than canned. Many a recording man retorts that if recorded Jack Bennys, Charlie McCarthys and other big-name shows were centrally recorded and delivered to individual broadcasters for local transmission, they could have higher fidelity to the original than can be attained over the present wire hookups.

Just who would profit by such a system, except for recording companies and some finely trained audience ears, is still problematical, but sure losers would be: 1) networks which would have little reason for existing; and 2) American Telephone & Telegraph Co., which collects some $6,000,000 annually from the networks for the use of 202,000 miles of wire hookups.

NBC might be able to afford the change, because its parent Radio Corporation of America owns the biggest recording outfit in the U. S. Yet in its time, NBC has okayed only one network recording (the Hindenburg disaster). Last week, however, NBC stepped bravely out. Henceforth Canada Dry’s Information Please, staged in Manhattan’s Radio City on Tuesdays between 8:30 and 9 p. m. Eastern Daylight Time, will be recorded by Los Angeles’ KECA instead of being immediately broadcast when it reaches the West coast at 4:30 Pacific Standard Time. The recording will then be transmitted over a “platter” network of seven NBC-Blue Coast stations at 8:30 p. m., Pacific Time, when most of the potential West Coast Canada Dry mixers have come home from golf or toil.

Information Please won this special dispensation because: 1) it is a scriptless, impromptu quiz show, hence cannot be rebroadcast later, like more predictable shows; 2) it is the star item on the Blue network, long considered a weak sister to NBC’s Red network and lately the subject of the briskest build-up campaign in NBC’s history. But to the suggestion that other big eastern shows now being rebroadcast might be recorded for the West instead, NBC’s retort was: “Would you rather kiss a girl or her picture?”

Experimenting on its own hook last week, KECA inaugurated a program called Encore Theatre, presenting the same show three times running each week to accommodate first-night absentees and those who might like to hear a program a second or third time.