Events
- January 13 – BBC Television broadcasts the play The Madhouse on Castle Street in the Sunday-Night Theatre strand. The play co-stars a young American folk music singer named Bob Dylan.
- April 1 – German terrestrial channel ZDF (pronounced tseh-deh-ehf) began broadcasting.
- May 15 – First television pictures transmitted from a US manned space capsule ("Faith 7"). Due to the poor picture quality, only NBC carries the transmission, and on tape-delay, not live.
- July 22 – Bob Crane quits his DJ job at radio station KNX to become a regular on The Donna Reed Show.
- September 2 – CBS Evening News becomes network television's first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, when the show is lengthened from 15 to 30 minutes.
- September 9 – NBC also expands its evening network news program to 30 minutes.
- September 30 – BBC Television begins using a globe as their symbol. They would continue to use it in varying forms until 2002.
- October 1 – ABC News at last drops its dependence on outside sources of news film and begins to rely on its own camera crews.
- November 22 – All three major U.S. networks start pre-emptions for a week following the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The pre-emptions unofficially begin a few minutes after Kennedy was shot; on the top-rated American soap opera As the World Turns, Nancy Hughes (Helen Wagner) was in the middle of a discussion with Grandpa (Santos Ortega) about Bob's (Don Hastings) decision to invite Lisa (Eileen Fulton) to Thanksgiving dinner. Walter Cronkite interrupted Wagner mid-speech to deliver the bulletin. As the World Turns continued for one more scene (at that time, the show was transmitted live) before Cronkite cut in permanently. News of the assassination, and later the funeral procession, were the first television broadcasts across the Pacific Ocean (via Relay 1 satellite).
- November 23 – UK BBC tv That Was The Week That Was broadcasts its famous, non-satirical Kennedy tribute episode. William Hartnell stars in the very first episode of Doctor Who: "An Unearthly Child". So many people complained of having missed it (because of the disruption to schedules caused by the assassination) that on the following Saturday Episode 1 was repeated followed by Episode 2.
- November 24 – Jack Ruby murders John F. Kennedy's suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald live on television.
- December 7 - Instant Replay is used for the first time during the live transmission of the Army Navy Game by its inventor, director, Tony Verna.
- For the first time, most Americans say that they get more of their news from television than newspapers.
- The television remote control is authorized by the FCC.
Read more about this topic: 1963 In Television
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden into history, it is the stories we didn’t write, the questions we didn’t ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematising the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray’s Anatomy.”
—J.G. (James Graham)