I bet you'd have to be independently wealthy to own any of the RCA TVs on Steve's site, when those sets were new. I'm guessing the early RCA color sets, CTC4, 5, 6, etc. went for $500+ in the early '50s, which would be well over $1k in today's dollars. It probably wasn't until the late '60s-'70s that color TV really took off in the US, and even then most folks were still watching b&w until some years later. (The lack of color programming in the '50s-'60s didn't help matters much, either.) The same thing happened with flat screens; when the first ones came on the market, they went for $1k or more, even for smaller screen sizes. (Bear in mind, this was long before ATSC->NTSC converter boxes were available to allow the use of older NTSC analog TVs with the then-new DTV signals.) Flat-screen TVs didn't drop in price significantly until the DTV transition forced people to buy new TVs when the old CRT set developed expensive repair problems, like a bad CRT or flyback -- or even worse.
NBC was the first so-called "full color" television network, beginning 100-percent colorcasting in the mid-'60s. This boosted the sales of RCA color sets, since RCA owned NBC at the time.
BTW: IMO, the reason NBC has gone downhill in recent months, overtaken by CBS which is now "America's #1 most-watched network",
is probably, even likely, due to the fact that a nationally-known cable television service provider, Comcast, bought NBC from GE last year; however, I think NBC was in trouble from the beginning (or just shortly after) when it sold out to GE, so the Comcast deal just made things 1,000+ times worse for the so-called "Peacock" network when it was finalized last year.
Please don't get me started on those decade-plus old shows still running on NBC (Smash, The Voice, The Biggest Loser, et al). I don't see how, in this age of TV shows that normally do not last more than one season (or two, if the network is extremely fortunate and still gets decent ratings for these programs year in and year out), such programs have lasted so long. I do not watch any of the shows I mentioned, so their futures on NBC really do not concern me (they could all be canceled tomorrow and it wouldn't bother me a bit), although I do wonder why they are still on the air after ten-plus years. Perhaps NBC, after all these years and decades, is finally running out of ideas for original programming, or perhaps cable, direct-to-viewer content over the Internet (YouTube in particular), DVDs, DVRs, video-streaming boxes by Roku, Boxee, et al. are cutting into the network's ratings?
I don't think NBC-TV will ever go out of business, but the new ways people have nowadays of getting TV programming may well mean the end of the network's glory days is near, or perhaps it has arrived already.