Thread by @CrazyItalianPol

Video killed the radio star... but Italian politics killed the color TV!

How a political short-sightedness delayed technological progress and ruined many Italian companies.

A thread 🧵

Today's state television network, RAI, was founded in 1944 from the ashes of EIAR, the radio broadcasting organisation founded during fascism.

On the morning of 3 January 1954, television announcer Fulvia Colombo launched the regular television broadcasts of the National Programme (today's Rai 1).

In this video you can see the first ever Italian broadcast.

In the same year, television stations in the United States began broadcasting in colour.

However, it must be said that colour TVs were very expensive: the first one on the market cost $1175 ($9000 in today's money). Some cars were cheaper.

Keep the detail of cost in mind, because it will be an important element in this story.

Despite the technological disadvantage, Italy was not too far behind: RAI had the technology to broadcast in colour as early as 1961, at the birth of the second channel Rai 2.

But why did it not happen?

Politics, bitches.

Italy did not have its own transmission system. In Parliament, precisely in 1961, a war was being fought between those who preferred the SECAM system, French, and those who preferred the PAL system, German.

Amintore Fanfani, secretary of the Christian Democratic party, had a man loyal to him at RAI, the general manager Ettore Bernabei, and lobbied for Italy to adopt SECAM.

Charles de Gaulle, President of the French Republic and godfather of SECAM, hinted through an intermediary that he would increase imports of Italian agricultural products if the French transmission system was adopted by Italy.

But beyond the choice between SECAM and PAL, all politics harboured an ideological rejection of colour television. 

Thus a strange convergence of technically opposing parties was created.

Ugo La Malfa, of the Republican Party, was extremely opposed to it: he did not accept the expenditure of money and industrial effort required by the introduction of colour TV. His opposition had some weight, since his party supported the government's.

The Communist Party and the CGIL trade union were against it, fearful that colour television would cost Italians a lot of money and would start a vicious consumerist cycle.

The Republicans, Christian Democrats and Communists found another ally in their fight against colour television: FIAT, which feared that Italians, if they had to spend money on colour TV, would no longer have money to buy a second car.

This bizarre ideological alliance between the centre parties, the communists and the automobile industry forced Italians to watch TV in black and white for many years to come. 

And... we had not yet decided which transmission system to adopt!

It was Ettore Bernabei himself who came up with a stratagem.

He, despite pressure from Fanfani, was not at all convinced about SECAM, but he could not say a flat 'no'.

In 1972, on the occasion of the Munich Olympics, Bernabei had two rows of TV sets set up in the RAI hall: one broadcasting with SECAM, the other with PAL.

The better quality of PAL was evident, and RAI decided that it would adopt the German system.

The home appliance company INDESIT, meanwhile, had developed its own transmission system: ISA, which would have solved both the problem of choice and the duty to pay royalties due to the PAL or SECAM systems.

Although the new system was technically better, it was not so from a political-economic point of view.

On 11 August 1975, the President of the Republic decided that Italy would adopt PAL.

On 1 February 1977, many years later than in other countries, all Italian broadcasts were transmitted exclusively in colour.

Unfortunately, the adoption of the PAL system hurt Italian television manufacturers, who had hoped for the adoption of SECAM to sell their products on the African markets.

In addition, due to the delay in the adoption of color broadcastings, Italian companies had not developed color TVs. The market was thus taken mainly by German industries, and many Italian firms, which were behind the times, closed down.

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