The first proto-TVs in the '20s were clumsy affairs with a screen the size of a stamp and a rapidly spinning wheel that acted roughly like the shutter on a movie projector; it wasn't until later that the CRT was developed to the point where a reasonably sized picture was available. On top of that, the cameras were very inefficient, and required lighting of brutal intensity to pick up much of anything.[QUOTE/]
TV documentaries tend to harp on the primitive pictures of the early Baird and other electro-mechanical broadcasts and ignore how (comparitively) good systems were by the mid 1930s when Britain, Germany, France and the USSR (but not the US) had regular public broadcast systems operating. Systems that were just about as good as those provided post-war and well into the 1950s. It is often forgotten that, by 1939, there was video disc recording, "live" outside broadcast, telecine facilities and limited cable (via co-ax) distribution. There was also projection and re-lensed TV to give picture sizes up to a metre (36 inches to you).
All that aside, let's suppose that there were sufficient driving forces to develop the technology, and that economic conditions were such that it was more or less affordable. I'd bet that the first private owners would be much like they were in OTL: places of public accommodation; i.e., bars (presuming no prohibition). Probably sports would have constituted a lot of early programming, but I'd guess it would have been primarily football: baseball owners were largely hostile toward broadcasts, especially of home games, early on. Think about how the infant NFL might have done in the '20s even with primitive coverage--or how college football might have fared.
Britain and Germany made most of the running on early TV in technical development. The Germans (because of the men with the cool uniforms) usually don't get their due (look here)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_cQrjsyh1o&feature=related
While Britain, Canada and the US suspended TV in the war years, Germany broadcast throughout--even extending the service to some occupied countries.
What everyone was lacking was content. As far as sports coverage was concerned, think contemporary newsreels. No zoom lenses, no playbacks, no multiple camera angles--there had to be a learning curve. ( Most of the techniques of sports coverage we take for granted were invented by Leni Reifenstahl for the 1936 Berlin Olympics film).
Boxing worked well for TV and was the main sport broadcast in the US in the experimental period. Not for nothing was the BBC news bulletin called until 1955 "Radio newsreel" and consisted of a man in a dinner jacket reading from a paper script supported by the odd still photograph or brief film clip.
The business model also had to be found. In Germany and the USSR most TV was operated in a type of mini-cinema/theatre rather than the home. I know that in the UK a dual EMI/Baird TV with built in radio cost GBP500, rather more than a small car, in the US a 12 inch RCA model cost $445.
(Then again my first mobile phone cost me $3000!).
The US never had State broadcasters of radio in the early days and stumbled across advertising by mistake (see history of the soap opera) which meant that programming had to highly populist, but it did provide a model for TV. (Does any US radio channel still broadcast plays, panel shows, educational and arts programmes?).
I don't think TV would have helped the political situation too much: assuming (a shaky assumption, I'll admit) the rise to prominence of the same individuals in OTL, it would have certainly given a boost to demagogues like Huey Long and Adolf Hitler. I question how well FDR might have done on TV, or to what lengths people may have resorted to mask his disability.
You have a point here that deserves a lot more examination.
Look at the newsreels of the 1930s. Politicians were still talking to camera as if they were addressing public meetings without a microphone and no one ever interviewed them--their was no intimacy and definitely no close ups. Even when they tried a friendly, behind-the-desk chat, they look shifty and false. It is significant that the just pre-TV era saw the last of the lofty giants of politics, Rooseveldt, Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle, Mussolini, Hitler. As TV became widely established in OTL, politicians became ordinary, rather grubby little men, until a new generation of Telegenic politicos arrived.
How demagogues and totalitarians may have developed TV as a propaganda tool in a period of demagogary is worth some speculation.
In OTL, after initially being enthralled, viewing populations tend to recognise propaganda lies however well-packaged (at least they did in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China and South Africa-- in Britain and America, I am not so sure).
Getting back to the infrastructure: I suspect TV would have been essentially a northeast corridor phenomenon in the US (a few stations in New York, plus one or two each in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington) with islands, if you will, in Chicago, LA, SF, and a few other cities. It would have been something only heard about for decades in much of the south and the plains states, though. I also suspect it would have been an evenings-and-weekends only phenomenon: say, a few hours between 7:00 PM and 10:00 PM local time, and at first, anything apart from sports would have been essentially radio programming in front of a camera.
How very perceptive. Early British TV was exactly that--radio with pictures and as late as the mid 1950s was only on for about three-four hours per night. I am old enough to remember a still picture being broadcast during the period between Children's Programmes (about 3.00PM) and the early news (at 6.00 PM) labelled "Intermission".
(For the old people, it was either a kitten with a ball of string or a teddy bear in a box)