Campaigning For Competition
To this end, Collins and some financial backers established a company called High Definition Films Limited in 1951, the stated aim of which was to improve the telerecording process (by which television programmes were recorded onto film for repeat broadcasts, sales or posterity), but which in reality functioned as an official group to lobby for competition in television broadcasting.
In 1953, Collins and two of his business partners Robert Renwick and C.O. Stanley (of the Pye electronics firm) together with several others, formed the Popular Television Association, campaigning more publicly for the establishment of an independent broadcaster, writing to the government to point out the inherent dangers of a single broadcaster holding a monopoly as the BBC did and making an equally strong campaign in the press. Their lobbying was successful, and in early 1954 the government passed the Television Act, which opened the way for the creation of the new network under the auspices of the newly formed Independent Television Authority (ITA).
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Famous quotes containing the word competition:
“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)