TV Thaw

Half the nation is without television because of a construction "freeze" imposed in 1948 by the Federal Communications Commission. The ban on building new TV stations, supposed to last only a few months, actually lasted 3 1/2-years, while FCC officials and the industry wrestled with the problems of color television, war scarcities and a shortage of TV channels. This week FCC finally lifted the ban, announced that in July it will start considering applications for new TV stations.

Now there are only 108 TV stations in the U.S. The new FCC ruling assigns a total of 2,053 stations to 1,291 communities, which will virtually blanket the U.S. and its possessions, from Alaska to Puerto Rico, with TV. Two hundred forty-two stations are to be set aside for noncommercial "educational use." To make sure there is room enough for everybody, FCC is also assigning 70 new ultra high frequency channels to television.

FCChairman Paul Walker hopes TV-hungry communities will not expect miracles overnight. Says he: "Television will not gallop to its new frontier. It will proceed at a snail's pace."

Delegates to a UNESCO conference on TV in Paris learned last week that 16 nations now have TV, and that eight others plan to join them by 1953. The U.S., with 17 million TV sets, has more than six times as many as the rest of the world; second place, Britain, with 1,350,000; third, Canada, with 90,000 (though it has no TV transmitters operating yet and must eavesdrop on U.S. telecasts). Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, France and the Soviet Union follow, with 30,000 to 50,000 sets each, with Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and Argentina far behind. By this fall, Canada and seven Latin American nations expect to be televising their own shows.

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