History
While the first US commercially-licensed UHF television stations signed on as early as 1952, the majority of the 165 UHF stations to begin telecasting between 1952 and 1959 did not survive. UHF local stations of the 1950s were limited by the range their signals could supposedly travel, the lack of UHF tuners in most TV sets and difficulties in finding advertisers and TV network affiliations. Of the 82 new UHF-TV stations in the United States broadcasting as of June 1954, only 24 remained on the air a year later.
Fourth-network operators such as the DuMont Television Network, forced to expand using UHF affiliates due to a lack of available VHF channels, were not viable and soon folded. The fraction of new TV receivers that were factory-equipped with all-channel tuners dropped from 20% in 1953 to 9.0% by 1958, a drop that was only partially compensated for by field upgrades or the availability of UHF converters for separate purchase. By 1961, with 83 commercial UHF stations still on-air, the number of new TV's capable of receiving UHF as well as VHF channels had fallen to a record low of 5.5% with a small number of viable stations situated in localities where a lack of available VHF frequencies had forced early expansion onto UHF.
While public educational television was available from 105 US stations by 1965, many of them in the already-crowded VHF spectrum, only 18 percent of the large number of UHF frequencies reserved for educational use in US cities were in active use. In areas where audiences had no UHF receivers, a station broadcasting above channel 13 was unlikely to survive.
Under the All-Channel Receiver Act, FCC regulations would ensure that all new TV sets sold in the U.S. after 1964 had built-in UHF tuners. By 1971, there would be more than 170 full-service UHF broadcast stations nationwide; the number of UHF stations would grow further to accommodate new television networks such as the Public Broadcasting Service (1970), Fox (1986), Univision (1986) and Telemundo (1987).
UHF TV stations would ultimately outnumber their long-established VHF counterparts.
Read more about this topic: All-Channel Receiver Act
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