First in Color

"NBC made the first coast-to-coast color broadcast when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1954, with public demonstrations given across the United States on prototype color receivers by manufacturers RCA, General Electric, Philco, Raytheon, Hallicrafters, Hoffman, Pacific Mercury and others. A color model from Westinghouse H840CK15 ($1,295, or $10.6 thousand in today's dollars) became available in the New York area on February 28, 1954 and is generally agreed to be the first production receiver using NTSC color offered to the public; a less expensive color model from RCA (RCA-CT100) reached dealers in April 1954. Television's first prime time network color series was The Marriage, a situation comedy broadcast live by NBC in the summer of 1954. NBC's anthology series Ford Theatre became the first network color filmed series that October.

Early color telecasts could be preserved only on the black-and-white kinescope process introduced in 1947. It was not until September 1956 that NBC began using color film to time-delay and preserve some of its live color telecasts. Ampex introduced a color videotape recorder in 1958, which NBC used to tape An Evening With Fred Astaire, the oldest surviving network color videotape.

Several syndicated shows had episodes filmed in color during the 1950s, including The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, My Friend Flicka, and Adventures of Superman. The first two were carried by some stations equipped for color telecasts well before NBC began its regular weekly color dramas in 1959, beginning with the Western series Bonanza.

NBC was at the forefront of color programming because its parent company RCA manufactured the most successful line of color sets in the 1950s, and by 1959 RCA was the only remaining major manufacturer of color sets.CBS and ABC, which were not affiliated with set manufacturers, and were not eager to promote their competitor's product, dragged their feet into color. CBS ceased all regular color programming between 1960 and 1965 (including at least one of their shows, The Lucy Show, which was filmed in color, beginning in 1963, but continued to be telecast in black and white through the end of the 1964-65 season), while ABC delayed its first color series until 1962. The DuMont network, although it did have a television-manufacturing parent company, was in financial decline by 1954 and was dissolved two years later.Thus the relatively small amount of network color programming, combined with the high cost of color television sets, meant that as late as 1964 only 3.1 percent of television households in the U.S. had a color set. NBC provided the catalyst for rapid color expansion by announcing that its prime time schedule for fall 1965 would be almost entirely in color. ABC and CBS joined the bandwagon and over half of their combined prime-time programming also was in color that season. All three broadcast networks were airing full color prime time schedules by the 1966–67 broadcast season, and ABC aired its last new black-and-white daytime programming in December 1967. Public broadcasting networks like NET did not use color film for a majority of their programming until 1968. But the number of color television sets sold in the U.S. did not exceed black-and-white sales until 1972, which was also the first year that more than fifty percent of television households in the U.S. had a color set. This was also the year that "in color" notices before color television programs ended, due to the rise in color television set sales, and color programming having become the norm."

Color broadcasting in Hawaii started in September 1965, and in Alaska a year later.

Information from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television