CBS Wins Color: FCC Licenses First Broadcast System

The FCC licensed CBS's mechanical color television system for broadcast on October 11, 1950, making it the first approved color standard in the United States. The decision capped a fierce technological and corporate battle between CBS, which had developed a system using a spinning color wheel in front of the camera and receiver, and RCA, whose all-electronic system was still in development. CBS's system produced vivid color but had a fatal flaw: it was incompatible with the roughly twelve million black-and-white television sets already in American homes. An RCA set could not display a CBS color broadcast at all, not even in black and white. RCA's system, by contrast, would be backward-compatible, allowing existing sets to display color broadcasts in monochrome. The FCC sided with CBS in 1950, but the market disagreed. Manufacturers refused to produce CBS-compatible receivers because consumers did not want to buy sets that could not receive the vast majority of programming. CBS broadcast a limited color schedule, but the lack of sets meant the shows had virtually no audience. RCA continued developing its compatible system, and in 1953 the FCC reversed course and approved the NTSC standard based on RCA's technology. This standard remained the American television color standard until the digital transition in 2009. The CBS episode is often cited as a cautionary tale about the difference between technical quality and market adoption. The better technology lost because it required consumers to abandon their existing equipment, a dynamic that has repeated across the technology industry ever since.