Blue Network - Television

Television

As of June 1945, commercial television in the United States had been frozen, owing to the lower level of priorities given to it as compared to war work. Furthermore, ABC was generally slow to move into television broadcasting. It did not acquire a television station until WJZ-TV (now WABC-TV), Channel 7 in New York was completed in the summer of 1948, followed by four other Channel 7 stations which signed on in 1948 and 1949 in Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Until those stations were built, ABC had to lease time and studio facilities from other stations including DuMont network New York flagship WABD, as well as other stations in Philadelphia and Washington which eventually helped form the core of the ABC television network. It might be supposed that the Blue Network never existed in television, but as noted above, the Blue Network did make at least a few known forays into television prior to the June 1945 name change. For example, the Blue Network applied for a construction permit for a TV station in the upper VHF band, but all such applications were shelved during the war years. Experiments were also conducted by the Blue Network in television program production before it permanently became ABC and formally opened a network under the ABC name in 1948. The script for a February 25, 1945 broadcast of Ladies Be Seated, which was a relatively popular audience-participation/stunt game show on Blue Network radio, still exists, and is reprinted in full in Ritchie; it is, in fact, the script for the first broadcast. It was hosted by Johnny Olson, who would later become the long-running announcer on CBS's The Price Is Right. Technically, this was not a network broadcast, as it was broadcast locally on WRGB, the General Electric television station in Schenectady, New York. However, the opening title card, according to the script, was for "The Blue Network of the American Broadcasting Company." No video copy of this broadcast is known to exist.