This isn't the fast or easy approach, but I have found much excellent
material on the development of television production techniques and the
emergence of various aesthetic conventions by digging up early TV
production manuals as well as all the "how to" books that proliferated
between roughly 1950 and 1955.
The New York Public library has many of these, as do some universities such
as UCLA. Other journals and magazines, such as Broadcasting-Telecasting,
can sometimes be useful as they discussed production issues but also
featured tons of advertisements offering new technical equipment.

It has also been interesting to see the gradual rise of university and
college courses, network production seminars, and other such formal
workshops and classes after about 1950 that were highly influential in
inscribing aesthetic norms and production techniques in the medium's
nascent stage.

If you seek titles of some of the production manuals that I've come across,
please contact me off-list.

Murray Forman
Communication Studies
Northeastern University
boston, MA, 02115

----
Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org