Television broadcaster
A television broadcaster or television network is a telecommunications network for the distribution of television content, where a central operation provides programming to many television stations, pay television providers or, in the United States, multichannel video programming distributors. Until the mid-1980s, broadcast programming on television in most countries of the world was dominated by a small number of terrestrial networks. Many early television networks such as the BBC, CBC, PBS, PTV, NBC or ABC in the US and in Australia evolved from earlier radio networks.
Overview
In countries where most networks broadcast identical, centrally originated content to all of their stations, and where most individual television transmitters therefore operate only as large "repeater stations", the terms "television network", "television channel" and "television station" have become mostly interchangeable in everyday language, with professionals in television-related occupations continuing to make a differentiation between them. Within the industry, a tiering is sometimes created among groups of networks based on whether their programming is simultaneously originated from a central point, and whether the network master control has the technical and administrative capability to take over the programming of their affiliates in real-time when it deems this necessary – the most common example being during national breaking news events.In North America in particular, many television networks available via cable and satellite television are branded as "channels" because they are somewhat different from traditional networks in the sense defined above, as they are singular operations – they have no affiliates or component stations, but instead are distributed to the public via cable or direct-broadcast satellite providers. Such networks are commonly referred to by terms such as "specialty channels" in Canada or "cable networks" in the U.S.
A network may or may not produce all of its own programming. If not, production companies can distribute their content to the various networks, and it is common that a certain production firm may have programs that air on two or more rival networks. Similarly, some networks may import television programs from other countries, or use archived programming to help complement their schedules.
Some stations have the capability to interrupt the network through the local insertion of television commercials, station identifications and emergency alerts. Others completely break away from the network for their own programming, a method known as regional variation. This is common where small networks are members of larger networks. The majority of commercial television stations are self-owned, even though a variety of these instances are the property of an owned-and-operated television network. The commercial television stations can also be linked with a noncommercial educational broadcasting agency. Some countries have launched national television networks, so that individual television stations can act as common repeaters of nationwide programs.
On the other hand, television networks also undergo the impending experience of major changes related to cultural varieties. The emergence of cable television has made available in major media markets, programs such as those aimed at American bi-cultural Latinos. Such a diverse captive audience presents an occasion for the networks and affiliates to advertise the best programming that needs to be aired.
This is explained by author Tim P. Vos in his abstract A Cultural Explanation of Early Broadcast, where he determines targeted group/non-targeted group representations as well as the cultural specificity employed in the television network entity. Vos notes that policymakers did not expressly intend to create a broadcast order dominated by commercial networks. In fact, legislative attempts were made to limit the network's preferred position.
As to individual stations, modern network operations centers usually use broadcast automation to handle most tasks. These systems are not only used for programming and for video server playout, but use exact atomic time from Global Positioning Systems or other sources to maintain perfect synchronization with upstream and downstream systems, so that programming appears seamless to viewers.
Global
A major international television broadcaster is the British Broadcasting Corporation, which is perhaps most-well known for its news agency BBC News. Owned by the Crown, the BBC funds itself in two ways. UK services branded under BBC are funded by the television license paid by British residents, as a result no advertising appears on these services. The advertising-funded arm employs 23,000 people worldwide including the operation of broadcaster UKTV in the UK itself. Experimental television broadcasts were started in 1929, using an electromechanical 30-line system developed by John Logie Baird. Limited regular broadcasts using this system began in 1934 and an expanded service started from Alexandra Palace in November 1936.History
Electronic television was made and demonstrated in San Francisco, on September 7, 1927, it was designed by Philo Taylor Fransworth who has been working on it since 1920.United States
had long been dominated by the Big Three television networks, the American Broadcasting Company, CBS and the National Broadcasting Company ; however, the Fox Broadcasting Company, which launched in October 1986, has gained prominence and is now considered part of the "Big Four". The Big Three provide a significant number of programs to each of their affiliates, including newscasts, prime time, daytime and sports programming, but still reserve periods during each day where their affiliate can air local programming, such as local news or syndicated programs. Since the creation of Fox, the number of American television networks has increased, though the amount of programming they provide is often much less: for example, The CW only provides fifteen hours of primetime programming each week, while MyNetworkTV only provides ten hours of primetime programming each week, leaving their affiliates to fill time periods where network programs are not broadcast with a large amount of syndicated programming. Other networks are dedicated to specialized programming, such as religious content or programs presented in languages other than English, particularly Spanish.The largest television network in the United States, however, is the Public Broadcasting Service, a non-profit, publicly owned, non-commercial educational service. In comparison to the commercial television networks, there is no central unified arm of broadcast programming, meaning that each PBS member station has a significant amount of freedom to schedule television shows as they consent to. Some public television outlets, such as PBS, carry separate digital subchannel networks through their member stations.
This works as each network sends its signal to many local affiliated television stations across the country. These local stations then carry the "network feed", which can be viewed by millions of households across the country. In such cases, the signal is sent to as many as 200+ stations or as little as just a dozen or fewer stations, depending on the size of the network.
With the adoption of digital television, television networks have also been created specifically for distribution on the digital subchannels of television stations and Nexstar Media Group.
Cable and satellite providers pay the networks a certain rate per subscriber. The providers also handle the sale of advertising inserted at the local level during national programming, in which case the broadcaster and the cable/satellite provider may share revenue. Networks that maintain a home shopping or infomercial format may instead pay the station or cable/satellite provider, in a brokered carriage deal. This is especially common with low-power television stations, and in recent years, even more so for stations that used this revenue stream to finance their conversion to digital broadcasts, which in turn provides them with several additional channels to transmit different programming sources.
History
Television broadcasting in the United States was heavily influenced by radio. Early individual experimental radio stations in the United States began limited operations in the 1910s. In November 1920, Westinghouse signed on "the world's first commercially licensed radio station", KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Other companies built early radio stations in Detroit, Boston, New York City and other areas. Radio stations received permission to transmit through broadcast licenses obtained through the Federal Radio Commission, a government entity that was created in 1926 to regulate the radio industry. With some exceptions, radio stations east of the Mississippi River received official call signs beginning with the letter "W"; those west of the Mississippi were assigned calls beginning with a "K". The number of programs that these early stations aired was often limited, in part due to the expense of program creation. The idea of a network system which would distribute programming to many stations simultaneously, saving each station the expense of creating all of their own programs and expandingus transmitted from station to station to listeners across the United States. Other companies, including CBS and the Mutual Broadcasting System, soon followed suit, each network signed hundreds of individual stations on as affiliates: stations which agreed to broadcast programs from one of the networks.As radio prospered throughout the 1920s and 1930s, experimental television stations, which broadcast both an audio and a video signal, began sporadic broadcasts. Licenses for these experimental stations were often granted to experienced radio broadcasters, and thus advances in television technology closely followed breakthroughs in radio technology. As interest in television grew, and as early television stations began regular broadcasts, the idea of networking television signals was born. However, the signal from an electronic television system, containing much more information than a radio signal, required a broadband transmission medium. Transmission by a nationwide series of radio relay towers would be possible but extremely expensive.
Researchers at AT&T subsidiary Bell Telephone Laboratories patented coaxial cable in 1929, primarily as a telephone improvement device. Its high capacity also made it ideal for long-distance television transmission, where it could handle a frequency band of 1 MHz. German television first demonstrated such an application in 1936 by relaying televised telephone calls from Berlin to Leipzig, away, by cable.
AT&T laid the first L-carrier coaxial cable between New York City and Philadelphia, with automatic signal booster stations every, and in 1937 it experimented with transmitting televised motion pictures over the line. Bell Labs gave demonstrations of the New York–Philadelphia television link in 1940 and 1941. AT&T used the coaxial link to transmit the Republican National Convention in June 1940 from Philadelphia to New York City, where it was televised to a few hundred receivers over the NBC station W2XBS as well as seen in Schenectady, New York via W2XB via off-air relay from the New York station.
NBC had earlier demonstrated an inter-city television broadcast on 1 February 1940, from its station in New York City to another in Schenectady, New York by General Electric relay antennas, and began transmitting some programs on an irregular basis to Philadelphia and Schenectady in 1941. Wartime priorities suspended the manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from 1 April 1942 to 1 October 1945, temporarily shutting down expansion of television networking. However, in 1944 a short film, "Patrolling the Ether", was broadcast simultaneously over three stations as an experiment.
File:DuMont Affiliates 1949.png|thumb|right|upright=1.35|The DuMont Television Network in 1949. DuMont's network of stations stretched from Boston to St. Louis. These stations were linked together via AT&T's coaxial cable feed, allowing the network to broadcast live television programming to all the stations at the same time. Stations not yet connected received kinescope recordings via physical delivery.
AT&T made its first postwar addition in February 1946, with the completion of a cable between New York City and Washington, D.C., although a blurry demonstration broadcast showed that it would not be in regular use for several months. The DuMont Television Network, which had begun experimental broadcasts before the war, launched what Newsweek called "the country's first permanent commercial television network" on 15 August 1946, connecting New York City with Washington. Not to be outdone, NBC launched what it called "the world's first regularly operating television network" on 27 June 1947, serving New York City, Philadelphia, Schenectady and Washington. Baltimore and Boston were added to the NBC television network in late 1947. DuMont and NBC would be joined by CBS and ABC in 1948.
In the 1940s, the term "chain broadcasting" was used when discussing network broadcasts, as the television stations were linked together in long chains along the East Coast. But as the television networks expanded westward, the interconnected television stations formed major networks of connected affiliate stations. In January 1949, with the sign-on of DuMont's WDTV in Pittsburgh, the Midwest and East Coast networks were finally connected by coaxial cable. By 1951, the four networks stretched from coast to coast, carried on the new microwave radio relay network of AT&T Long Lines. Only a few local television stations remained independent of the networks.
Each of the four major television networks originally only broadcast a few hours of programs a week to their affiliate stations, mostly between 8:00 and 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time, when most viewers were watching television. Most of the programs broadcast by the television stations were still locally produced. As the networks increased the number of programs that they aired, however, officials at the Federal Communications Commission grew concerned that local television might disappear altogether. Eventually, the federal regulator enacted the Prime Time Access Rule, which restricted the amount of time that the networks could air programs; officials hoped that the rules would foster the development of quality local programs, but in practice, most local stations did not want to bear the burden of producing many of their own programs, and instead chose to purchase programs from independent producers. Sales of television programs to individual local stations are done through a method called "broadcast syndication", and today nearly every television station in the United States obtains syndicated programs in addition to network-produced fare.
Late in the 20th century, cross-country microwave radio relays were replaced by fixed-service satellites. Some terrestrial radio relays remained in service for regional connections.
After the failure and shutdown of DuMont in 1956, several attempts at new networks were made between the 1950s and the 1970s, with little success. The Fox Broadcasting Company, founded by the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation, was launched on 9 October 1986 after the company purchased the television assets of Metromedia; it would eventually ascend to the status of the fourth major network by 1994. Two other networks launched within a week of one another in January 1995: The WB Television Network, a joint venture between Time Warner and the Tribune Company, and the United Paramount Network, formed through a programming alliance between Chris-Craft Industries and Paramount Television. In September 2006, The CW was launched as a "merger" of The WB and UPN ; MyNetworkTV, a network formed from affiliates of UPN and The WB that did not affiliate with The CW, launched at the same time.