#Cinescope vs movie#

#Cinescope vs movie#

In his book, Here is Television (1946), Thomas Hutchinson observed that the movie studios were initially reluctant to release “any great portion of their product for television. Locations that had television reported movie theatres closing in a great wave, including 70 in eastern Pennsylvania, 134 in Southern California, 61 in Massachusetts, 64 in Chicago and 55 in New York City.īy 1946, there had been roughly one million television sets in the United States. The cities without television reported no drop in attendance or even increased movie patronage. In 1951, the cities that had television experienced a 20 to 40 percent drop in movie attendance. The cities with television provided an excellent means of examining the impact of TV on motion picture attendance.

By 1953, TV stations grew exponentially, as did sales of televisions. This was also the beginning of commercial television with sponsored programming. From 1948 to 1952, New York and Los Angeles each had seven TV stations, but there were many major cities in the United States without television. On May 6, 1948, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), after granting licenses for a hundred TV stations, had imposed a freeze so that interference problems could be analyzed. Thousands of movie theatres had closed and the motion picture industry desperately needed a way to pull the public away from their new television sets and back into theatres. From 1946 to 1952, attendance at movie theatres had dropped by almost half, from 83 million to 46 million per week. With the inauguration of television after World War II, motion picture attendance suffered a precipitous decline.