Video: 'NBC Tournament of the Roses Parade 1954'

(Friday, January 1, 1954, 9:15 a.m. PST) — NBC broadcast the first coast-to-coast color TV program today as it presented live coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California, in NTSC color.

The broadcast used a new mobile color TV studio (truck) and the program is carried across the continent on 21 stations.

RCA strategically places color TV sets in public viewing areas such as hotel lobbies because the first sets only become available to the public in the spring.

The network was so proud of the achievement it later made a newsreel-type video touting the accomplishment. The voice-over was triumphantly poetic: “Color,” it announced, “the fabric of the rainbow, riding piggyback on an invisible stream of electrons.”