As a child, I do remember watching some of the first sporting events broadcast live from Europe via satellite. It was new technology then, and I marveled that it was possible. The manned space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was covered well by television and I remember watching the launches and recoveries of the space capsules with awe.
Here is something that I just learned about from the book "When the News Went Live." This passage was written by Bob Huffaker:
Walter Cronkite had broadcast the first news of the tragic three shots while viewers saw only a lettered bulletin slide on the screen. He had been unable to address a CBS camera because none was warmed up. In 1963 we still relied upon vacuum tubes as well as the newly developed transistor, and our sound cameras used film with an optical sound track alongside the reel of framed pictures. Hold the developed film to light, and you would see the squiggly white line that reproduced sound as it passed through a projector. There were only two satellites: Telstar bounced microwaves to Europe, and Relay had just begun reflecting them to Asia. JFK had taped a greeting to Asia for Relay’s official inauguration, which was to fall upon the day of his death. Microwave relay was the newest way to send a broadcast signal, but television and radio news methods were barely beyond the Stone Age compared to today’s era of cybernetics and digital electronics. And now, although frequency-modulated radio—FM. barely noticed in the sixties—sends a static-free signal beyond quality of AM radio, television remains the prime news medium that it became on November 22, 1963.
