By Andrei Lankov
The 20th century has been called by many names. It was “the century of the atom,” “the century of space flight,” or “the century of television.” The last label is as good as any other, but one has to keep in mind that TV began its rise to prominence only in the middle of the 20th century. Nonetheless, in a few decades television changed the way we lived, learnt and spent our free time.
The first experiments with wave transmission of moving images took place at a surprisingly early stage, in the 1920s, but only around 1950 did TV become commercially viable ― in developed nations, that is. In the U.S. TV reached a majority of households by the early 1960s, but in the less prosperous nations TV sets remained a rarity until much later.
In 1954, a middle-aged Korean man was sitting in the lobby of a hotel in New York. His name was Hwang Tae-yong, and he was a radio engineer-turned businessman who came to the U.S. to negotiate the purchase of radio equipment. While watching a TV, Hwang concocted a daring plan: he wanted to introduce TV broadcasts to Korea.
The required equipment was shipped, the necessary approvals given, and the preparation work began. In early 1956 the would-be Seoul TV station started hiring personnel, and at 7:30 p.m. May 12 that year the first broadcast began. Korea had acquired its own television network!
The new network was called KORCAD-TV, but it is usually remembered by its identity call-sign, HLKZ-TV. It was also often called “Chongno TV,” after a street where its office and its studio were located. In the first stages, the new station was technically a Korean branch of the mighty RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, a U.S. company which under charismatic David Sarnoff dominated early U.S. television broadcasts.
In 1957 the TV content consisted of entertainment (30 percent), news (10 percent) and educational programs (an impressive 50 percent). In those days, video recording was still rare, so most programs had to be broadcast live.
On weekdays, the broadcast began at 8:30 p.m. and ended around 10:30 p.m. Movies were a staple of the programming in those early years when the network had neither the money nor expertise to produce its own shows. Only in the late 1960s, well after the demise of the HKLZ-TV, did dramas take over TV scheduling.
HKLZ-TV did not have many viewers, since very few Koreans could afford a television in those days of extreme poverty. When broadcasts began, there were merely 300 TV receivers nationwide. In 1962, the year after HKLZ-TV went off air, the number remained at the low level of 8,000.
TV was seldom watched privately in those early days. Most of the few available TV sets were installed in public places: hotel lobbies, windows of large department stores and other similar places. The shows were to be watched and enjoyed together.
However, the small number of TV sets also meant that HKLZ-TV had to struggle hard to make ends meet. Like most TV stations, it largely relied on advertising revenue for survival, and few companies were willing to use a media form which reached such a small number of potential consumers.
Incidentally, another station began broadcast in Korea in 1957, although this station was not technically considered Korean at all. AFKN-TV was a station which served U.S. troops in Korea. It did not pay much attention to the peculiarities of the country where it was located, but since Korean TV sets could easily receive the AFKN-TV signal, and since most of the TV sets were owned by the educated (often English-speaking) elite, AFKN-TV programs were watched widely.
In 1957 HKLZ-TV changed owners. It was bought by the Hankook Ilbo newspaper company. However, this change of ownership did not help much; HKLZ-TV remained a struggling business.
In February 1958 it suffered a serious blow. Soon after midnight a fire destroyed its studios in downtown Seoul. For a while, HKLZ-TV had to use AFKN-TV’s transmitters. Then the studio was rebuilt, but it seems that it never really recovered from that fire. Korea in the late 1950s had no market to sustain a purely commercial TV station, and so in late 1961, HKLZ-TV discontinued its broadcasts and was formally liquidated.
The next ― and far more successful ― attempt to introduce TV to Korea was undertaken by the government itself. In December 1961 KBS-TV began broadcasting. The new station included a number of engineers and producers who once worked for HKLZ-TV. Soon afterwards the dramatic improvement in Korea’s economic situation made TV sets affordable; and so it was that KBS succeeded in bringing television to the average Korean.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.