Television: Your Own ETV Station

Never have Americans had more TV channels to choose from — and never has the choice been so generally mediocre. Last week the Columbia Broadcasting System displayed a new device that could turn any TV set into the equivalent of a home movie projector and screen. The viewer could thus play his favorite movie or opera or hear an educational lecture whenever he pleased.

In the CBS system, the original material would be commercially transferred onto a new type of film. Home viewers would then insert cartridges of the film in a breadbox-size playback unit, which would send audio-visual signals into the antenna terminals of the TV set. A seven-inch cartridge, resembling a discus, could play up to 30 minutes in color, an hour in black and white. Now called Electronic Video Recording (EVR), the system may reach the U.S. market by 1970.

The big advantages of EVR, which will be tried in British schools in 1969, are low cost and professional reproduction. Though home videotaping systems, which record and reproduce, are now available, they cost anywhere from $700 to $3,100. The first EVR play back units will be manufactured in Britain for $280, but one unit could be wired into many TV sets — thus serving every classroom in a school. The film will start at $21 to $52 per hour, but since it now takes only 30 seconds to make a duplicate of a 20-minute program, mass production in the U.S. could well cut prices by 75% and eventually result in TV sets with built-in EVR.

EVR developer is CBS-Laboratories President Peter Goldmark, who invented the long-playing record in 1947.

Goldmark envisions EVR as “a new educational art form” in which “you can have your teacher mailed to you.” When EVR is perfected, he says, master teachers will “communicate with kids with the same intensity as Mickey Mouse does now,” while housewives replay souffles step by step with Julia Child and amateur cellists (like Goldmark himself) play duets with Pablo Casals.