Movie-TV Competition

Report Outline
Use of Movies on Television Programs
Intermingling of Movie and TV Interests
Decade of Theater-Home Screen Rivalry

Use of Movies on Television Programs

Release to television of several thousand Hollywood movies of relatively recent vintage has opened a new phase in the struggle between the two media—movies and TV—for domination of the mass entertainment market. While continuing to fight each other on most fronts, the two industries appear to have taken an important step toward an eventual joining of forces. The deals which unlocked the old-film vaults of the major studios accentuated an already evident trend toward an interlacing of economic interests. Elements in each industry, however, view that trend as detrimental to the future of both forms of entertainment.

The most pessimistic of the critics foresee an end to television's unique role as a communications medium offering a balanced fare of live and filmed entertainment, news and public events programs. They fear that the home television set will become little more than a technological replacement of the movie house projector. They suggest also that development of subscription TV, which would bring special programs, including current movies, to home viewers for a fee, would make the influence of film producers over the content of television entertainment still more pervasive. Meanwhile, local movie theaters would be limited in practice to showing for the most part only exceptionally spectacular films aimed at the luxury market.

Release of Hollywood Features for TV Showing

Around $100 million worth of feature movies, many of them yesterday's top box-office attractions, have become available recently for commercial showing on television. According to Billboard, Dec. 29, more than 2,700 feature films were released in 1956 for use on television. This was ten times the number of movies turned over to TV in 1955 and constituted more than two-thirds of the total number made available to the newer medium in all previous years. Outstanding among such transactions of the past year or so have been the following: