Anyone knows? How much you had to pay to RCA Victor sometime around 1948/1949 to buy a complete TV station, let's say one with three studio cameras, a film chain, a slide projector and a remote truck?

I am trying to do a research on this, because one author wrote that the first Brazilian TV station ( innaugurated in 1950 ) cost 5 million dollars, other said it cost only 300 thousand dollars. I want to find out who was right ( or more close to the truth ).

Here's an equipment catalog:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/rca_broadcast_eqpt_prices.html

But, that would only be part of the story. A television station would hire what we would today call a system integration vendor. It wasn't unusual for that vendor to be a major television equipment manufacturer, which is how you ended up with TV stations with all RCA equipment or all GE equipment. They would come in and put the whole thing together from spec to install for the customer, so that would have a cost.

Then there would also be land for the transmitter, and a custom built studio, etc.

It's could be difficult to figure out, although sometimes the stations themselves would say "our new x million dollar facility" in their advertisement literature, so that might be a rough guess as to the total cost.

David

I thank you for your help. Guess it is gonna be a little more difficult than I thought to find the exact value.

Millions of US Dollars to build a station from scratch. And many thousands of dollars annually to maintain one.

My father worked at WRC-TV, Channel 4, in Washington, D.C. It was said to be the first television plant built "from the ground up" for color broadcasts. It was completed in 1957. My dad told me RCA invested $20 million in the plant at the time it was built. This would have to be considered opinion, however, I do have the original dedication documents stored and will check them. I seem to remember a dollar figure was mentioned. Also, there was a special article in RCA Broadcast News Magazine on this station, so when I have a spare moment, I will check that as well.

Regards,
Mark

Scan in some of the documents, PLEASE !!!!:banana::banana::banana:

Television station WAGA in Atlanta was built in the '50s from scratch. I don't know how much it cost to get it on the air, but my best guess is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (1950s dollars, that is; today it would probably be in the millions). There was an article in, I believe, Radio-TV Experimenter magazine some time in the '60s, titled "The Stately Station That Home-Brew Built", that described how the station was constructed. I don't have the article anymore (threw out the magazine years ago), but I still remember the details from it. The station was the CBS affiliate for the Atlanta area and operated on channel 5; it is now affiliated with FOX. The CBS affiliation went to a UHF station in Atlanta called WGCL-TV on channel 46.

I believe I have RCA price lists for the late 40's and will get a close idea but I think around $1-1.5 milion comes to mind for just the equipment

I dunno, but along w/the "Freeze", I'd wager the high cost of outfitting a station kept MANY smaller markets out of the TV game til the mid '50s...Here, we didn't have TV til late '53 or early '54...

I do not own a scanner, however I do have access to one here at work. Please give me some time to do this, I won't forget. Family and work issues are taking a lot of my time right now, but I will get these posted.

Regards,
Mark

Follow the link below to Volume #91, October 1956, page 29, (pdf page 31) RCA Broadcast News Magazine, and note the cost of building WRC-TV, the "first television station built from the ground up for color broadcasting" was $4 Million. The inflation calculators on Internet indicate that is about $32 Million in todays dollars.

http://www.americanradiohistory.com/RCA-Broadcast-News-Page-Range-Guide.htm

Thanks for the link... that might give me a more or less idea of how much a B&W station might have cost a few years earlier.

My guess: Figure black and white gear is 1/2 or less the cost of color; the building and transmitter cost the same; lighting cost maybe 1/2 - 3/4 of color (still need lights, but less total candlepower).

You mentioned a remote truck - so add in the cost of more cameras and gear.

A great link the Jan 1954 issue was a very interesting READ !:banana::banana:

According to Murray Bolen in his book The Fundamentals of Television, published in 1950, it depended on what level of service you were going to provide, which in effect meant how much original programming you were going to do. He gives estimates for several different levels of service, and they run from about $140,000 to $425,000. The hardware costs are based on the average of the two largest suppliers at the time (he doesn't name them, but presumably RCA was one), and labour estimates are based on the experience of stations on the air at the time. He specifically leaves out, however, the purchase of the real estate, the payment of royalties for the programming, and a few other things.
He gives a very detailed breakdown of the costs, which is too long to quote here; let me see if I can extract the relevant pages and send them along. Or, if you like, I believe the entire book is in pdf format on earlytelevision.org.
Hope this helps.

Here are the cost estimates from Bolan's book.

I do remember that a black and white RCA Tk-11 or TK-31 camera chain went for about $17,000 in 1957 - 59. You can extrapolate out from that what the rest of the studio equipment might cost. Color TK-41s were going in the $60,000+ range.