Regarding the 70 years of the appearance of television in Colombia, it is worth taking a look at the tortuous path that the television had to travel before being installed in homes, clarifying that it was not a different process from that of any other country in the world. .
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Just like in Colombia, Housewives in the United States and Europe found the first televisions so ugly that manufacturers had to figure out how to make them more attractive.. Without conquering them, it would have been impossible to massify the new medium because they felt a strong resistance against this large and soulless intruder that did not combine with any other object in the home space.
That is why devices with a wooden body were made (a drawer with four legs that also served as a support surface for vases, artistic porcelain and embroidered folders), which harmonized with the furniture in the living room, and incorporated a radio and record player: what today We would call it “multimedia”, but in the middle of the 1960s.
There was also the price barrier. Just like today’s electric cars, the first televisions were out of reach for most families. In 1957, a new television cost 2,495 pesos in Colombia and the urban monthly minimum wage was 155 pesos. By 1960 the proportion had worsened: devices of 4,000 pesos compared to salaries of 198 pesos.
The televisions had to be imported and during the initial 11 years, counting from the inauguration in 1954, less than 9,000 receivers entered the country annually, which gave a density of only 4.9 devices per thousand inhabitants, very slightly higher than the of Africa and very low compared to the average of Latin America, which already reached 29. It was of very little use that the Rojas Pinilla government offered subsidies and credit plans: the monthly payment At the end of 1954 it could cost 10 pesos, when the minimum wage barely reached 60 pesos.
The sale of duty-free devices in the San Andrés archipelago, declared a free port in 1953, took off very slowly and only increased significantly about ten years later.
Things began to improve thanks to the ingenuity of Japanese manufacturers, who at the end of the sixties began to mass produce transistorized devices. Gone were the bulky, wooden furniture-type televisions, and came the proudly electronic, autonomous device, with an aluminum or plastic body and “aerodynamic lines.” The improvement of the internal circuits contributed to the new receivers being sharper and more efficient, lighter and, above all, cheaper.. Thanks to this and the fact that television receivers began to be manufactured in Colombia in 1966, from 1964 to 1984, an average of 75,000 units per year were added to the country’s television fleet, including those imported and those assembled nationally. Adding figures from the Dane statistical yearbooks, in 1986 there were more than one million six hundred thousand televisions, with coverage of more than 90 percent of homes.
Committing a considerable portion of the family’s wealth to a new device had to be offset by some comparative advantage, but in the first ten years there was very little to see on the screen.
The programming was scarce and was done exclusively in Bogotá. In the four or five hours a day, the programs were broadcast primarily live, from the small studios on 24th Street, with intervals of films given by the embassies. The American series of cowboys and detectives came shortly after, but national production continued to have great technical limitations until 1965, when the first professional video recorders (videotape) arrived, making it possible to go from live “teletheatre” to dramatized ones. television itself, including soap operas. This advance also allowed viewers to begin enjoying soap operas recorded in other countries in Hispanic America.
In the first fifteen years, our own programming served little purpose other than navel-gazing. There was no way to connect live with what was happening in other places in the world, to the point that the country was about to miss the most important event in the history of world television: the arrival of the first manned flight to the moon. , on July 20, 1969. Only thanks to an unusual feat, the scene of the astronauts walking on the lunar surface could be seen in Colombian homes through a provisional microwave link, located on the Las Jurisdicciones hill, to bring the signal from Venezuela.
A year later, andPresident Carlos Lleras Restrepo inaugurated the Chocontá earth station, which not only made it possible for us to see the world soccer championship in Mexico 70 and all those that followed, but it was also used to incorporate the country into the newly created “Ibero-American space”, through the OTI Song Festival, very popular during the seventies. To prevail in homes, the television had to compete with the queen of home entertainment: the radio. In 1955, Colombia had 109 stations that broadcast complex productions such as radio soap operas and adventure series – The Right to Be Born, Kalimán, Chan Li Po, The Law Against the Underworld – and musical programs with large orchestras and continental soloists, as well as the sporting exploits of professional football and the return to Colombia, in addition to the humor of Guillermo Zuluaga ‘Montecristo’, Los Tolimenses and La simpatica escuelita de doña Rita, all of them broadcast live (with the performers made up and dressed theatrically) from the sumptuous radio plays from the big chains in Bogotá and Medellín.
For the inhabitants of large regions of Colombia there were no reasons to buy a television until the beginning of the sixties, for a very simple reason: there was no signal. In its first two years, television could only be tuned in Bogotá, Manizales and Medellín.
It arrived in Cali in 1956 and spread gradually between 1958 and 1962, when the transmitter network reached Bucaramanga, part of the Santanderes and the Atlantic coast.
The daily programming was extended from 6 in the afternoon to 10 at night, but those were the only advances. In 1965, test broadcasts of a second national (educational) channel began, simultaneously with the TV9 Tele-Bogotá channel – which viewers called ‘Teletigre’ – which was only on the air for five years and later gave rise to the creation of a new national chain.
When listing the obstacles to the mass adoption of television, the poor quality and insufficient coverage of the electrical network that Colombian homes suffered for decades must also be taken into account. In our country, regional electrical systems were only interconnected starting in 1971, when substations in Antioquia, Valle del Cauca and Cundinamarca were linked for the first time, with a common point in Caldas, which stabilized the service and reduced outages.
The truth is that no country was completely prepared for television and similar difficulties arose in all of them. In Europe, television was only inaugurated in Portugal, in 1955; in Spain, in 1956; in Sweden, in 1957; in Finland, in 1958; in Norway, in 1960 and in Iceland, in 1966. On this side of the Atlantic, in countries like Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, there were also setbacks and delays, typical of a technology that is expensive to implement and sustain. In Mexico, the inaugural broadcast took place in August 1950, with coverage only in the capital city. Only in 1959 did the construction of a national extension network begin, reaching it in 1968, just in time to transmit the Olympic Games that took place in that country.
In Argentina, television began to operate exclusively for the capital, Buenos Aires, in October 1951, and after almost ten years of technical precariousness it reached its moment of greatest expansion during the sixties.
In Chile, The first broadcast occurred in Valparaíso, the second city in the country, in August 1959, and during the first year there were only broadcasts on Fridays.
In the following two years, two universities in the capital, one private and one state, created experimental channels, with irregular broadcasts until 1962. An extraordinary event like that year’s Soccer World Cup, based in Santiago and seven other cities, It led these fledgling channels to create daily and stable programming from then on.
The popularization of television in Colombia had an additional obstacle: because it emerged within a dictatorship, when Rojas Pinilla fell there was a five-year period in which both the Military Junta and the government of Alberto Lleras Camargo They offered almost zero support for the new medium. The sale of televisions stopped almost completely and content production was left adrift.
In the mid-sixties, with the technological changes noted and the legal stability of relations between individuals and the State that led to the newborn National Institute of Radio and Television (Inravisión), the conditions were created so that Colombian families would increasingly have more reasons and possibilities to buy a device that offered them both a window to the world and a mirror in which to look at themselves as citizens of the same country.
José V. Arizmendi C. for EL TIEMPO
Professor of Media History – Javeriana University
