TV was free in 1954. 

Well, free after you bought a set, which was an expensive proposition. A 21-inch black-and-white inside a large wooden cabinet sold for about $250. That already seems like a lot, but we’re also talking 1954 dollars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that set would cost nearly $2,900 today.

The first color TV set for the public went on sale in 1954. That cost about $1,000. Then. That’s the equivalent of about $11,000 in 2024. That’s a lot of loot, considering only NBC aired prime-time programs in color, and all news and sports was in black and white.

Which is why barely more than half of the country had sets in 1954. Add to that the expense of mounting an antenna on your roof – you had to do that to get the signal until they started building smaller sets with their own “rabbit ears.”

After that, TV was free.

But, as you probably surmised, TV prices dropped. While just about everything else you can think of has soared in price, TV set prices, accounting for deflation, have fallen more than 90%.

TV became a bargain. By the 1970s, most people had color sets. And everything was broadcast in, as NBC used to put it, “living color.”

The problem is that a sharp TV picture – something we take for granted – was hard to come by. Antennas sort of worked, except in big cities and rural areas. People would sometimes stand by their set because they believed that through some static electrical phenomenon it improved the picture.

The solution was to deliver TV service a different way – through cables attached to a system that got its signal from another new invention, satellites. 

Not only would the new cable systems show regular local and national programming, but it would open up lots of space for new and different channels. That included channels that could show the more intense films being released in theaters without cuts.

There was a catch: You had to pay for cable TV.

We do it routinely now, for it or satellite or fiber-optic. But older people, among them my parents, found the idea offensive. They held off as long as they could.

It took my parents into the 1980s to give in. But give in they did – in their later years, they loved watching shows on HBO (as we discussed in No. 19 last week). And, of course, they couldn’t get the YES Network, the channel of their beloved New York Yankees, fast enough.

What they found was that the quality of the picture was infinitely better. So much so that people were able to use TV sets with high definition – a picture so clear that professional sports now use it to determine if a game official called a play correctly.

But if you had told them in 1954 that they would spend more than $1,000 a year to get a TV picture, my Dad would say, as he often did when something seemed ridiculous, “Get outta here!”