The TV Station Sign-off: Six Wasted Hours of Ad Revenue

Today, it’s impossible to image the you could turn on the television and find nothing to watch. Yes, TV stations would simply shut down for the night. Back in the day, it cost too much to run programming overnight to a small audience without advertising revenue. Of course, the infomercial solved that problem.

Someone was always up last night, namely Hair Club president Sy Sperling or Suzanne Somers pimping her ThighMaster (but infomercials are part two of this column – coming soon!). Before that, the transmitter, located on a nearby mountaintop, would stop transmitting signals your television picture would go to static, Poltergeist-style. Then, in the fifties and sixties, television stations started to use the now famous RCA Indian Head test pattern. Instead of going to static, they would sign-off at the end of the day’s programming was over and place this test pattern:

I always believe this test pattern was just a placeholder, however, it had a definitive purpose. Little did we know that that everything had a purpose. Test signals helped maintain the reception and display quality of the black and white analog televisions. Tt was used to measure the resolution of the signal then align the receiver to get the best possible picture (if that was possible before HDTV):

Here’s a 1950’s Phillips television showing a version of the test pattern sign off card:

In the late fifties, it dawned on station managers that this was valuable media real estate began adding their their station call letters for extra branding.

But then the stations added a video of a waving American flag playing the Star Spangled Banner and the whole paradigm shifted. Here’s my all-time favorite sign-off from my local television station, channel 9, KHJ-TV: