Going Viral
We live in a wonderful age of ever-expanding technology. Giant home screen HD 3-D television in digital format is bigger, better, clearer, and fuller sounding than the movie house version of the same picture and any sporting event can be followed better at home than it can in even the finest new stadiums. Once NL fans figure out that they are paying for season tickets just to watch their home club play on the big screen at the stadium, many will opt to stay home and watch a picture that is even more pleasing in the comfort of their own homes.
Some of us grew up in an era when there was onl radio at home for electronic program entertainment and record players for special music collections. Remember 78’s?
In Houston, we finally got television on January 1, 1949 when a fellow named Albert Lee opened Channel 2 as KLEE-TV. The station soon was sold to the Hobby family and re-named what it still is to this day, KPRC-TV. Channel 11 joined the Houston TV airways in 1953 as KGUL-TV, later becoming KHOU-TV as the station’s base of operations moved from Galveston to Houston. KUHT-TV, Channel 8, signed the air on May 25, 1953 as Houston’s third television station and the first public television station in the nation at the University of Houston. KNUZ-TV, Channel 39, soon joined the Houston airways as the fourth local station in October 1953, but its shaky financial operations were bought out by KTRK-TV, Channel 13, when they came on the air the following month in November 1953.
In those beginning times, TV’s were big clunky console models with 10″ screens and poor picture quality, but we didn’t care. Back ten, we would pretty much watch anything that moved, And that movement included variety acts on the Ed Sullivan Show, Texas League baseball from Buff Stadium, Friday Night Wrestling from the Municipal Auditorium with host Paul Boesch, Hopalong Cassidy westerns movies from the 1930’s, and the lips of local singers like Howard Hartman ad Marietta Marich on the PM weekdays Channel 2 talk show with host Dick Gottlieb.
Not much changed with programming until Houston got connected to the media center of the world in New York by the coaxial cable that brought the Today Show streaming into the city on July 1, 1952. “Good Morning,” said Today host Dave Garroway as Houston watched live picture feed from New York for the first time. – And the rest was history.
Not much changed on the technical side from there until the 1960’s when color TV finally arrived with its somewhat garish version of the color spectrum, but the sound was still small, tinny, and bad – especially for music. I even recall Johnny Carson commenting one night after a big performance on the Tonight Show. “It’s too bad you folks at home couldn’t really here how that sounded,” Johnny lamented. :With all the big improvement we’ve made with our color picture, the sound still comes from that tiny little tin-sounding box.”
The sound got better in time. By the late 1970’s, cable networks and VCR recording devices had increased the pressure for better sound. Today, with the interfacing of the computer and Internet, television is becoming in itself a mere component in a far more powerful approach to the communication of new, complex interactive contact, education, and daily living.
Once the turn of the 21st jacked up the high-tech crank on the new communications era, everything changed forever on how we make contact with each other. And, more and more, those who leave the Internet and the cell “phones” out of their lives are leaving themselves out of possibility’s mainstream artery.
Houston seems to be on the universal track with everyone else. Sure, millions still only “watch” TV, but millions of other primarily younger people, are using the multimedia technology that’s evolving to carve bold new avenues of life for themselves and others. The person today with the right technology know-how behind them can have an idea, a business notion, a political agenda, or a hit song all out there playing virally to the whole world overnight, if they catch the right drift of broad public attention and receptivity. (See “Facebook” and “Twitter” as Grade A examples.)
Dream big, everybody. There’s an elephant in the room with us. And he isn’t going away. Possibility for anything has never been more probable.If you are on board with the evolving ways people use to communicate with each other 24/7.
.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
Leave a comment