TeleMation Inc.

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Telemation Inc. logo Telemation inc Logo.jpg
Telemation Inc. logo

TeleMation Inc. was a company specializing in products for the television industry, post-production and film industry, located in Salt Lake City, Utah. TeleMation started with a line of black-and-white video equipment, and later manufactured color video products. Lyle Keys was the founder and president of TeleMation, Inc., started in the late 1960s. Early equipment was for the B&W broadcast, cable television, and CCTV market.

Contents

History

In 1954, Lyle Oscar Keys was an itinerant equipment salesman from Wibaux, Montana. John F. Fitzpatrick was president of The Salt Lake Tribune at the time. Fitzpatrick's assistant John W. Gallivan hired Keys as an engineer for KUTV Channel 2, of which the Tribune was part owner. In a time when the electronics industry was burgeoning, Keys knew how to get essential parts fast in a time when these parts were unavailable or slow to get. By 1962, the Tribune's owner, Kearns-Tribune Corporation, and their partners in KUTV organized Electronic Sales Corporation (ELCO) to help meet these needs. Keys was installed as president with an office in the Kearns Building in Salt Lake City.

Within eight years, the company, which had been incorporated as Telemation, had 420 employees, producing and marketing 156 products for the television industry with annual sales of $10 million. It became the nation's largest supplier of closed circuit TV systems and developed scores of proprietary items for cable television, industrial, educational and commercial TV.

Keys personally conceptualized many of the firm's products, helped engineer them, produced millions of dollars in sales, and even wrote Telemation's news releases and advertising copy. He also laid out the blueprint for the company's development of 84,000 square feet (7,800 m2) of space in southwest Salt Lake County's technological park.

The Kearns-Tribune Corporation's interest in this publicly owned enterprise as of early 1971 was twenty-four and one-half percent. [1]

Products

Weather Channel 97

Trivia

Fernseh is German for "television". In German the words fern and seh literally mean "far" and "see", respectively.

Because of all the mergers, customers sometimes fondly called these company(ies): Tele-bella-bosch-a-mation.

Thomson still operates offices in the cities of all these acquisitions:

Awards:

Telemation Productions

Telemation Productions was a post-production house in Seattle, Washington; Chicago, Illinois; Phoenix, Arizona; and Denver, Colorado in the 1970s and early 80s. Offices were sold or closed in the late 1980s. [3]

Telemation Productions was started as a marketing tool by Telemation Inc. in the early 1970s. It started as a single office located in Glenview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. In 1978, a second office was opened in Denver. Also in 1978, the television equipment manufacturing operation was sold to Bell & Howell. At that time, Telemation Inc. owned only the two production facilities and the manufacturing building in Salt Lake City, which was leased to Bell & Howell. In 1979 Telemation acquired a production facility in Seattle and renamed it Telemation Productions. In the early 1980s, Telemation acquired a facility in Phoenix, also renaming it Telemation Productions. In the early 1980s, Telemation Productions added a distribution division located in Chicago which provided duplication and shipping services to advertising agencies and a mobile division equipped with a television remote truck. Telemation Productions ownership changed in 1987 and again in 1990, with the Home Shopping Network buying the company. The Phoenix office and distribution division were sold in 1989 prior to this acquisition. The remote truck was sold in 1990. The Seattle office was closed in 1991, the Chicago office was closed in 1993, and the Denver office was closed the following year.

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References

  1. O. N. Malmquist, The First 100 Years: A History of the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah State Historical Society, 1971, pp 393-394
  2. grassvalley.com belden
  3. "Scott Kane - Deerfield, IL - iKarma". Archived from the original on 2007-09-28. Retrieved 2007-03-01.