NASA did not provide a direct video feed of Apollo 11's lunar surface activities to television stations. The broadcasters had to film it from a television screen in Mission Control. This was so that it couldn't be too closely examined for flaws. [Ralph Rene]

Mr. Rene notes a correct fact, but then elaborates an improbable theory to account for it.

First a television primer. A television signal according to the U.S. standards sends 30 frames per second. Each frame is composed of 525 horizontal lines of information. The signal describes the color and intensity of different points along each horizontal line. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of radio bandwidth (data-carrying capacity) to transmit a high-quality radio signal.

Communications from the lunar module (including the television picture) were transmitted over a radio frequency in the S-band. This is a high frequency that normally requires a large dish antenna in order to send a complicated signal like a television picture 240,000 miles. Apollo 11 carried such a dish antenna, and Apollos 12 and 14 used their big S-band dishes to send better television pictures. But since Apollo 11 was going to be a short visit, mission planners didn't want the astronauts spending time setting up the large freestanding S-band antenna if the smaller S-band antenna on the lunar module itself would work.

Besides, the world would want to see the first footstep on the moon, and the only way they could do that is if the television signal could be "squeezed" into the bandwidth provided by the small S-band antenna. Neil Armstrong could hardly have set up the freestanding antenna before taking his first step.

There are a number of ways engineers made that signal smaller. First they dropped the color information. If you only have to send intensity information (i.e., a black and white picture) you can cut the bandwidth by two-thirds. Then they reduced the number of horizontal lines. This of course reduced the clarity of the image, but it cut the signal size in half again. Then they reduced the number of frames per second.