1963 in television

See also:

Events

• January 13 - BBC Television broadcasts the play The Madhouse on Castle Street in the Sunday-Night Theatre strand. The play co-stars a young American folk music singer named Bob Dylan.
• May 15 - First television pictures transmitted from a US manned space capsule ("Faith 7"). Due to the poor picture quality, only NBC carries the transmission, and on tape-delay, not live.
• September 2 - CBS Evening News becomes network television's first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, when the show is lengthened from 15 to 30 minutes.
• September 9 - NBC also expands its evening network news program to 30 minutes.
• November 22 - All three major U.S. networks start pre-emptions for a week following the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The pre-emptions unofficially begin a few minutes after Kennedy was shot; on the top-rated American soap opera As the World Turns, Nancy Hughes (Helen Wagner) was in the middle of a discussion with Grandpa (Santos Ortega) about Bob's (Don Hastings) decision to invite Lisa (Eileen Fulton) to Thanksgiving dinner. Walter Cronkite interrupted Wagner mid-speech to deliver the bulletin. As the World Turns continued for one more scene (at that time, the show was transmitted live) before Cronkite cut in permanently.
• November 23 - That Was The Week That Was broadcasts its famous, non-satirical Kennedy tribute episode on the BBC.
• November 24 - Jack Ruby murders John F. Kennedy's suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald live on television.
• For the first time, most Americans say that they get more of their news from television than newspapers.
• The television remote control is authorized by the FCC.
• German terrestrial channel ZDF (pronounced tseh-deh-ehf) began broadcasting.