World War II ended in 1945, but a nasty battle raged for a decade afterward over color television. But first, TV had to conquer radio.

By 1947 only 250,000 TV sets were in use. At the beginning of 1949, radio boasted 81 percent of all broadcast audiences. By the end of that year, however, TV claimed 41 percent. By the end of the following year, the average daily radio listening session was down from nearly four hours to 24 minutes. By the end of 1951, there were nearly eight million TV sets in use. It was a short fight.

Color had been the holy grail of television almost from its infancy. As early as 1929, Bell Labs had demonstrated color TV transmissions. The original intention was to create a color system compatible with existing black-and-white sets, but this soon proved technologically impossible. All through the initial battles with radio, CBS and NBC were experimenting with competing color TV systems.

The CBS system was based mechanically on the Nipkow Wheel and developed by Hungarian refugee physicist Peter Goldmark, who shepherded the first color TV broadcast for CBS in 1940. RCA presented an alternative, so-called "compatible" system, an electronic system based on Zworykin's and Farnsworth's work and the NTSC standard.

At first, the FCC couldn't make up its mind, but in 1950 it approved CBS' system. The NTSC investigated, formed subcommittees and held hearings. In mid-1953, the NTSC recommended to the FCC that it reverse its earlier decision. In December 1953, the FCC did, approving the all-electronic NTSC color system proposed by RCA that is still the analog television standard today.

Three years later, Zenith created the couch potato when it perfected the first practical wireless remote control, the Space Commander, invented by Zenith researcher Dr. Robert Adler.

Sales of color TVs, however, were slow. Time magazine proclaimed that color TV was "the most resounding industrial flop of 1956". But in the fall of 1959, Sarnoff gave people a reason to buy them. In September, Sarnoff 's NBC premiered "Bonanza", the first new show to be shot and broadcast in color, and by 1964 it began a three-year run as the country's top-ranked show and remained in the rating’s Top 20 for the next ten years. NBC followed-up "Bonanza" in the fall of 1960 with "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color".

Soon color TVs began flying out of the stores. By 1967, as the colorful psychedelic era reached its peak, popular shows such as "Gunsmoke", "The Ed Sullivan Show", "The Andy Griffith Show", "Dragnet", "Bewitched", "My Three Sons", "Gomer Pyle" and "The Lawrence Welk Show" that had started in black and white now were being produced in color, and most new shows were being shot in color as well.

The first all-channel VHF and UHF sets were mandated in 1964, expanding TV viewing beyond just 12 channels.