| 1968 |
Numbers after entries link to the list of references. |
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| January 1 |
UK colour television licence is introduced at £10, double the black and white
fee—technically the basic £5 licence plus a £5 colour television supplement. |
à 1969 |
| February |
Television service starts in Jordan. |
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| February |
Arvin Industries in US introduces prototype fixed-head colour videotape recorder.
It uses 4,800 ft of half-inch tape compressed in a self-threading cartridge running at 160 ips. |
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| February |
Secretary-general of the Cinémathèque Française,
Henri Langlois, is dismissed on instructions from the French Minister of Culture, André
Malraux. The issue becomes a cause célèbre as the industry—including
many famous directors from around the world—and much of the political left
backs Langlois (in demonstrations pressaging les évènemements of the
coming May). Langlois is reinstated, with reduced funding, in April. |
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| March 28 |
Canadian government publishes a White Paper on satellite communications. |
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| April 1 |
Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) is established by the new Broadcasting Act. |
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| April 22 |
US Supreme Court rules in Ginsburg v. New York that
material not obscene for adults can still be obscene for children and, in Interstate
Circuit v. Dallas, that film classification schemes are constitutional if clearly defined. |
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| May 17 |
First European satellite, ESRO 2B, is launched. |
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| June 9 |
Canada’s four main political party leaders participate
in a televised debate prior to the federal elections on June 25. |
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| July 30 |
New UK Independent Television programme contracts come
into operation at 24:00. ABC Television and Associated
Rediffusion lose their licences, and ATV in London at weekends, replaced by
Thames, London Weekend; Yorkshire takes over Granada’s previous franchise east
of the Pennines. Thames is formed by the amalgamation of ABC and Rediffusion. |
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| July |
Television service starts in Equatorial Guinea. |
Television service starts |
| July |
Canadian government announces a policy of opening
up UHF frequencies for television broadcasting. |
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| August |
Strike by Association of Cinematograph Television and
allied Technicians (ACTT) blacks out live output of UK Independent Television. |
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| September 25 |
ITA Television Gallery exhibition opens at
ITA headquarters, opposite Harrods’ department store in London. |
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| September |
International Broadcast Institute (later International
Institute of Communications) formed. |
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| October 7 |
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) introduces its Code of Self-Regulation for
cinema film releases with four grades of classification: G (general), M (mature), R (restricted, no
unaccompanied children) and X (over 16 only). The code comes into effect on November 1. |
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| October 12 |
BBC field-store standards converter is used to relay
Olympic Games television transmissions from Mexico to Europe. |
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| October 24 |
UK government's Home Affairs Committee rejects an application from
Pay-TV Ltd to extend its experiment on cable systems in London and Sheffield.
Pay-TV, which claims it has already spent £1m on development and project management, wishes to raise
the limit on subscriptions from 10,000 to 250,000 by 1976 within an extended licence running to 1978.
The Committee says that continuation of pay TV could damage the 'public service concept of broadcasting'.
The Queen's uncle, Lord Mountbatten (father-in-law of Lord Brabourne, the project's instigator), blames
prime minister Harold Wilson personally for the rejection. |
 The Home Affairs Committee's argument for rejection |
| November 6 |
Heavily restricted and thus unsuccessful UK
pay TV experiment in London and
Sheffield cuts its losses and closes. |
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| December 12 |
Over-the-air subscription television (pay TV) is formally
adopted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a regular US broadcast service. |
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| December 28 |
Columbia re-organises as Columbia Pictures Industries. |
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| December |
Television service starts in Libya. |
Television service starts |
| l |
EMI buys a stake in Associated British Picture Corporation
by acquiring the remaining Warner Bros shares and launches a bid for full control. |
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| l |
BBC Television buys the rights to British Lion’s feature film library. |
|
| l |
Television service starts in war-torn Vietnam. |
Television service starts |
| l |
Spending on television commercials for the US
presidential campaign amounts to $27m, compared with $10m in 1960. |
|
| l |
White light 'rainbow' transmission hologram developed by Stephen A Benton (1941- ) at
Polaroid Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts—the first kind of hologram that can be viewed in almost
any light conditions, albeit within limited viewing angle. |
|
| l |
Four large (612mm x 455mm) holograms are made for promotional
display purposes at General Motors Building in New York by Conductron Corporation. |
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| l |
Universal Studios starts its highly profitable studio tours. |
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| l |
Matsushita markets the first videotape recording using the slant azimuth system. |
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| l |
Ampex HS-100 video disc recorder with slow motion and
stop-action facilities is used for first time by ABC during Olympic Games. |
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| l |
CBS demonstrates its EVR system of video playback to the US press. |
à 1969
The quest for home video: EVR |
| l |
First public demonstration in US of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) by RCA Laboratories. |
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| l |
NHK in Japan begins work on high definition television (HDTV). |
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| l |
Joint Industry Committee for Television Audience Research (JICTAR)’s British television
audience research contract with TAM ends, replaced by one with Audits of Great
Britain (AGB). |
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| l |
BBC instals automatic camera line-up equipment (CLUE) in its studios. |
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| l |
Manx Radio is bought by the Isle of Man government from
the Isle of Man Broadcasting Company and Pye Radio, a subsidiary of Philips. |
|
| l |
Tele-Communications Inc (TCI) is formed in Denver on the basis of
Community Television and Western Microwave. The wholly-owned subsidiaries
are renamed Community Tele-Communications, Inc. and Western Tele-Communications. |
|
| l |
Television service starts in Surinam; radio service starts in Qatar. |
Television service starts |
| l |
First fiction film produced in Angola: Monangambé, directed by
Sarah Maldoror, who also directed a short called Viva la Muerte. |
|
| l |
Setting up in New York and California of community video
groups Raindance Foundation, Global Village, Videofreex, People’s Video Theatre and Ant Farm. |
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| l |
Attempt to establish Free Radio Andorra, a commercial radio station for reception
in the UK on 428m MW, fails because of signal propagation problems. |
|
| l |
Australian Rupert Murdoch buys 51 per cent stake in UK newspaper News of the World
from Sir William ('Pissing Billy') Carr, who turns down an offer from Czech-born British publisher Robert Maxwell. |
à 1969 |
| l |
Chinese government bans books by 70 internationally celebrated authors, including Charles
Dickens, Emile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Aristotle, Plato and William Shakespeare. |
à 1978 |
| l |
Theatrical censorship in Britain, established in
1737, is abolished. The last production vetted by the Lord Chamberlain is a musical based on
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. |
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