Television is a lot older than you might imagine:

• As long ago as February 11, 1937, Connie Mack was interviewed to demonstrate the potential of television. (Mack was the manager and owner of baseball's Philadelphia Athletics--probably the greatest manager in the sport's history.) The technology--developed by Philo Farnsworth and others--goes back to the 1920s.
• The next month, France put a 30,000-watt television antenna atop the Eiffel Tower, in anticipation of broadcasting experiments during its World's Fair. A year later, the French began installing underground cable to carry television broadcasts.
• In February 1938, John Baird successfully transmitted a color broadcast from a London theatre to a 12 by 9 foot screen six miles away.
• That same month, BBC Television presented a 35-minute teleplay of RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots), by Carel Kapek-the world's first science fiction TV show!
• Finally, on April 19, 1938, NBC began a regular television broadcast: 5 hours a week, from the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. In September, NBC moved roving cameras into Rockefeller Plaza for the first televised "man-in-the-street" interviews.

All these stories come from the New York Times of the day.

Advertising and television didn't always go hand in glove. There is no mention of any advertising taking place during these shows. And the standard commercials we grew up with may soon become as anachronistic as dress gloves.

So what happened to early television?

World War II. But first, a message from our sponsor. . .

Just five months before America's entry into the war, the first television ad appeared: July 1, 1941--a few days after NBC announced its first-ever television advertising rates. For a fee of nine dollars, the Bulova Watch Company aired a 20-second commercial during a baseball game (Phillies and Brooklyn Dodgers, if you're curious).

The war interrupted television's growth, of course. Technologically and economically, the U.S. faced more pressing needs than entertainment.

After the war . . kaboom. We all know how TV took off.

A little factoid from the Los Angeles Times: $12 million was spent on TV ads in 1949. Three years later in 1952, spending had jumped to $158 million. Commercials in those days lasted a minute; it was not until the 70s that ads dropped down to 20 or 30 seconds.

Wikipedia tells me that in the 1960s, an hour-long show contained 51 minutes of the TV show and 9 minutes of ads. Today, we get about 42 minutes of show in that programming hour. Infomercials were not factored into those averages, btw.

The LA Times ran a story in their Business section about how computers are now changing TV advertising (not that ads ever settled into an unchanging pattern.) We all know that Tivo and tape hurt advertising. Now, though, a growing number of viewers are watching shows on their computer. That hurts the value of the standard commercial, but it opens up a whole world of possibilities for creative techies. Commercial time online can be filled with videos, interactive ads, quizzes, and ganes-anything to spark a potential consumer's interest.

Here's a sample of a video that lures you to an interactive ad for Jeep:

Actually, I think it's more interesting that some TV series. . . but beyond The Daily Show, I'm not a big watcher and thus not the target audience.