As the Fourth of July holiday approaches, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to escape reminders that this date marks the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of the United States as a nation. Television will certainly play a large role in making celebratory events accessible to everyone with access to a viewing device. And it’s equally certain that as much 21st-century broadcast technology as possible will be employed to create compelling event coverage.
The United States also celebrated a very significant anniversary 50 years ago—its bicentennial—and as this was the first such national milestone of the television era, broadcasters went all out to promote that event and wow viewers.
A Really Big ‘Salute’
July 4, 1976, occurred on a Sunday and celebrations spread across both Saturday, July 3, and Sunday, with the three major U.S. commercial networks beginning to deviate from normal schedules on Saturday and going all out in Bicentennial coverage on Sunday.
CBS—which had already been broadcasting its daily “Bicentennial Minutes” for two years—led the pack that July Fourth, with Bicentennial coverage occupying most of its 8 a.m. to midnight programming. NBC wasn’t far behind, breaking away from U.S. birthday special programming for “Meet the Press” and some evening entertainment specials. And if not based on program schedule hours devoted to coverage, NBC likely bested everyone else in the number of locations from which programming was originated, with feeds from all 50 states.
I was very much involved with Bicentennial television coverage then, and would like to share a few of my experiences and recollections, as well as offer a retrospective on the broadcast technology in use half a century ago.
In the early summer of 1976, I was 29 and just completing my first year with the U.S. Information Agency’s Motion Picture and Television Service or, in bureaucratese, the USIA’s “IMV.” We were also preparing for a major Bicentennial television extravaganza of our own, an operation dubbed “Salute by Satellite,” in which we would originate feeds of multiple U.S. Bicentennial celebrations. However, none of this programming would be seen by anyone in the United States.
While there was nothing secretive or clandestine about our operations, the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act prohibited domestic dissemination of our programming. Actually, at the time of my hire, the USIA’s motto was “Telling America’s Story to the World.”
A Technology Retrospective
Remote live feeds today are no big deal, thanks to bonded cellular technology and near-universal 5G telecom access; however, the landscape was quite different half a century ago. Satellite video connectivity was still in its early infancy, with Federal Communications Commission-mandated coordination and licensing of downlinks, as well as a 10-meter minimum antenna size.
Due to its cost and complexity, satellite-delivered video was almost exclusively the province of the major television networks, with use limited to coverage of events that could be planned well in advance, such as the Olympics.
When I began my employment at the USIA’s IMV, I learned that it too utilized—on a very limited basis—Intelsat links to deliver live video coverage of foreign heads of state being greeted by the U.S. president at White House ceremonies.
These were known as “facilitatives,” as we “facilitated” such coverage for foreign broadcast networks and stations. These satellite transmissions were so few and far between that they were observed by placing colored pins in a large global map in the IMV master control room, and at the time of my hire, there were only a few pins in the map. (The planned “Salute by Satellite” would add many more.)
In 1975, the USIA’s IMV television facility was only a couple of years old and state-of-the-art in almost every way. It was spread over several floors of a downtown D.C. office building and included two large studios, a number of edit suites with (of course) 2-inch quad VTRs and CMX 300 editors driven by DEC PDP-11 minicomputers (no PCs back then).
There was even a large kinescope (film) recording operation, as electronic standards conversion was just coming into its own, and most of the countries to which we supplied programming operated on PAL or SECAM standards and could not play NTSC 525/59.94 color videotapes.
The workhorse camera then was Norelco’s PC-70, and we had six of the latest production models, which could be moved from studio to studio depending upon requirements. (For those who never worked with imager tube cameras, these were not the “point and shoot” chip cameras of today. The PC-70’s setup panel had nearly 50 controls, with registration and color balancing of cameras requiring upwards of 30 minutes before they were ready for service.)
Linking Up
As the IMV was basically a large production/postproduction facility, we did not have a mobile van or truck, relying instead on rental units from D.C.-area suppliers when we did need to go live “on location” in connection with “facilitatives.” Due to its size, weight and solid-state technology (except for the Plumbicon imagers), the PC-70 was universally favored by these video truck rental operators, too.
Plans called for our “Salute by Satellite” programming to either originate live or via recordings made in our studios from multiple D.C. venues, including the White House, U.S. Capitol, National Mall, Jefferson Memorial and Constitution Avenue Bicentennial parade route.
Linkage back to our studios was supplied by the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. (now part of Verizon), which had installed a network of underground coaxial cables linking its headquarters with access ports at various points around the city. (C&P referred to these outdoor access ports as “pedestals” and a mid-1970s company “pedestal location” brochure lists 21 such video/audio feed points in D.C.)
Coax was the “go to” video linkage in cities then, as fiber-optic connectivity was still several years away. While portable/mobile microwave technology was available in connection with the nascent ENG rollout, it was not in widespread use in 1976. (I’m not sure how C&P routed feeds to customers from their access “pedestals” back then.) Video/audio routing switchers weren’t very prevalent in the 1970s, so the company may have used patch panels to make the required connections.
One of the remote feeds that we aired—the two-hour D.C. Bicentennial parade—originated just a few blocks from the IVM operation, and I was sprung from studio operations to help set up the contract video truck.
One of the (PC-70) camera positions was on a seventh-floor balcony of the Federal Trade Commission building, and I recall that while the camera head, tripod, and pan/tilt head could travel in the building’s passenger elevators, we had to pull the 81-conductor color camera cable up the side of the building due to its weight. It was at this location that I had my first glimpse of one of the new “minicams,” an Ikegami HL-33 (I believe). I recall being rather amazed by the video produced by such a small device.
Connectivity With Foreign Lands
Our “Salute by Satellite” video and audio was transported to a commercial uplink (a surviving drawing indicates that this was a Western Union facility near New York City) first by C&P, and then by AT&T Long Lines terrestrial pathing. IMV generated its video in NTSC, and as a result, most of what we shipped was in the form of 16-mm motion picture film recordings, or “kinescopes,” which could be aired by almost all broadcasters.
Obviously, converting our live feeds from NTSC to PAL or SECAM had to be performed in real time, and this was left up to Intelsat and the downlink sites involved. In 1976, with the advent of the digital technology that was beginning to emerge, electronic standards conversion was possible, but not in widespread use.
So, it’s likely that the tried-and-true “optical” conversion was used in connection with our feeds. This involved pointing a camera operating in the preferred standard at a video monitor displaying (in our case) NTSC. Resolution and signal-to-noise ratio were less than optimum, but it worked.
Despite the limitations of what today would be considered very primitive technology, our Bicentennial “Salute by Satellite” received glowing reports from the majority of those who did get to view it (an estimated 143,744,350 persons globally).
It marked the most ambitious undertaking of a television entity ever, dwarfed by even the smallest U.S. network, and was also a bargain, with cost per person reached reckoned at less than three-tenths of 1 cent per viewer.
