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48 Hour Mysteries or Dateline take note : The Brutal Murder of The East Coast Rave King | |
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But in the days of live TV what the camera saw went right out over the airwaves so broadcasters pretty much needed to be in a fixed location, a television station, in order to beam those images out to waiting sets. Larger stations in New York and Chicago were already broadcasting Major League Baseball games before 1950 however. The first game televised was in 1939, a college matchup. By 1948 every major league city but Pittsburgh had televised baseball for those few lucky enough to own a TV set. Those programs were enormously popular. Another obstacle to successfully broadcasting thoroughbred races was the tiny screen on the television sets themselves. The thoroughbreds would of course have to be shot from a distance making the race look not much better than dots moving around the black and white screen. As popular as the baseball game broadcasts were, producers started to branch out to other sports - football, soccer, tennis were all were relatively easy to film as they took place in fixed locations. Tennis especially allowed cameras to get in close while football proved a lot more tricky. Thick coaxial cables attached to the few cameras available for live TV was a big problem when it came to getting up close and personal when filming in an outdoor or stadium location. As home TV screens got bigger in the 1950s, the audience expanded rapidly. Television producers realized that the excitement of horse racing could now become a major component in their sports broadcasting expansion.
By the mid-1960s, racing of all types was a regular feature on ABC's Wide World of Sports, a weekend omnibus program. Yearly broadcasts of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing and The Preakness began shortly after that period as the technology improved.
It worked like this, when you visited your local grocery store - in my case the Big Bear in Greensboro, North Carolina - with your purchase you got a scratch-off racing ticket revealing 4 winners for 4 races. If your horse's names on the ticket for the final race won, you received the weekly prize of $100. Other race winners received smaller amounts of money and/or S&H Green Stamps. This program and others with a similar format - including greyhound and stock car racing - aired from the mid-1960s into the 1970s.
Of course, the odds of winning were set long before these races were packaged and televised so that they could control exactly how many winners there would be, this was done by televising competitions that were months or even years old. Clever, huh? MAKING MONEY WATCHING TV IN THE 60s: |
TV
on DVD/
/Holiday
Specials on DVD
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HORSE RACING ON TELEVISION
