June 2010 marks 50 years of TV broadcasts in NZ, 4 years later than Australia, but the impact was the same, not just on movie going, but on going out for entertainment generally. As we reported in our book Celluloid Dreams, it killed off most suburban cinemas in NZ within a few years. In 1973 came colour TV and in 1975 came the second channel. Video cassette recorders to hook up to the TV set made their appearance in 1981 and they were initially as expensive in proportion as TV sets were when they first appeared, but people still took to them like ducks to water.
Yet today, despite the multitude of channels available on freeview and pay TV plus of course a whole universe on the Internet, there is a cinema revival and places which had not had a cinema in the 1950s even have one now. Perhaps it is because all movies suffer on small screens as we commented in Celluloid Dreams.
What about the effect of TV on books though? Here the impact has been less positive. Apart from TV series tie-ins, moving pictures on screens of all sizes have made life much more difficult for book publishers. Such is the march of technology. Despite this, we feel that the features of high quality reference books manufactured the traditional ways - like those that we publish - more than compensate for the perceived advantages of illuminated screens.
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