Miniaturizing has been so perfected that high fidelity cameras and sound equipment can both be carried by one man at the scene of the news. The television newsman can go places he could not get into with his bulkier gear.

He can come closer than ever to bring­ing every nuance of the sight and sound of the story to his viewers. And he can do it in a completely unobtrusive manner.

In making some of these advances the engineers have brought new opportunities to more telecasters than ever, because costs of operation are being reduced to the point where they are within the capacity of the smaller station budget.

The sending of live pictures from space is a reality with great ramifications. So, of course, is the orbiting communications satellite, whose vast potential for television we have only begun to tap.

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Continuous refinements lie ahead in all the tools we have now. And the use of the most exciting of them will be expanded as fast as the budgets and the imaginations of the telecasters can catch up with what the scientist and engineers have wrought. All of us will be aboard vicariously when more and more astronauts reach the moon and beyond. Communication satellites will provide us with myriad visual and sound links, of which instant world-wide television and instant relay services with a nearly infinite number of channels with­in the United States are the only beginning.

Joseph V. Charyk, President of the Communication Satellite Corporation, predicts an “information revolution that will recast the nature of the world in which we live”. He speaks of a communi­cation utility to be established in metropolitan centers and says:

“This would be a system which would link homes, business offices and stores in a community through transmission facilities to central switch­ing and computing centers to provide a wide variety of services.

This would include colour television end stereophonic FM radio, aural and visual telephonic service, high-speed facsimile’ date and news­papers, library reference, theatre and transportation booking services, access to computer facilities, shopping and banking services of all kinds, centralised charging and billing………………………… Communications destined beyond this metropolitan area would be directed to a processing and transmission centre which, in turn, would be linked through a suitable terminal station to a world-wide satellite system.”