Network radio's fate has some lessons for today

[Commentary] The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck. They're trying to second-guess the ­future—so why not look back at the past? Today's new-media revolution, after all, is not the first time that technological change has laid waste to the best-laid plans of the old media. The same thing was happening 60 years ago. Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own. Network radio was still the dominant mass entertainment ­medium. If you wanted to listen to Bing Crosby or "The Quiz Kids," you tuned in to their radio programs. While there were roughly 85 million radios in use throughout America, there were 1.3 million TV sets, 750,000 of which were on the East Coast. Television was still a pricey toy. A console set with a 16-inch picture tube cost $695 in 1949—half the price of a new car. Every TV station in the country was operating in the red, and NBC ran its fledgling TV network at a loss of $13,000 a day, $116,000 in ­today's dollars. But on Jan. 11 of that year, television in America turned a technological corner when eight stations on the East Coast and seven Midwestern stations were linked via the first long-distance coaxial cable. All at once it was possible for a significant slice of the American public to watch network TV programs live.