Television broadcaster

• 1. Introduction

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  Television broadcaster networks are the invisible architecture behind nearly every program that has ever appeared on a screen. At their core, they are telecommunications systems designed to push a single stream of programming outward to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of stations simultaneously. Before this infrastructure existed, every station in every city had to produce or acquire its own content entirely on its own. The cost was crippling. The solution, borrowed almost wholesale from radio, changed what audiences could watch and who decided what they watched. How did a cable buried under a stretch of American road in the 1930s lay the groundwork for a global broadcasting order? And why do the words "network", "channel", and "station" mean the same thing to most viewers but something very different to the people who run them?

• 2. Radio's Blueprint

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  In November 1920, Westinghouse signed on what it called the world's first commercially licensed radio station, KDKA, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Within a few years, other companies had built radio stations in Detroit, Boston, New York City, and beyond. The Federal Radio Commission, a government body created in 1926, issued broadcast licenses and sorted stations geographically: those east of the Mississippi River received call signs beginning with the letter W, while those west of it were assigned calls beginning with K. The number of programs these early stations could air was sharply limited by the cost of creating content from scratch. The network model emerged as a practical answer to that problem. By sending a single program from one originating point outward to many affiliated stations simultaneously, each station could be relieved of the financial burden of filling its own schedule. CBS and the Mutual Broadcasting System followed the early network pioneers, and each network eventually signed hundreds of individual stations as affiliates. That same logic, built for audio, would be transplanted almost directly onto television when the time came.

• 3. Coaxial Cable and Early Television

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  Researchers at AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories patented coaxial cable in 1929, primarily as a device for improving telephone transmission. Its capacity was remarkable: it could carry 240 telephone calls simultaneously, and it could also handle a television signal's much wider frequency band of 1 MHz. Germany demonstrated this possibility in 1936 by relaying televised telephone calls from Berlin to Leipzig, 180 km away, over cable. AT&T then laid the first L-carrier coaxial cable between New York City and Philadelphia, with automatic signal booster stations placed every 10 miles. By 1937 the company was experimenting with transmitting motion pictures over the line. In June 1940, AT&T used the link to carry the Republican National Convention from Philadelphia to New York City, where it was seen on a few hundred receivers over NBC's station W2XBS, which later became WNBC. NBC demonstrated an inter-city television broadcast on the 1st of February 1940, from its New York station to one in Schenectady, via General Electric relay antennas. Wartime priorities then suspended the manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from the 1st of April 1942 to the 1st of October 1945, freezing the expansion of television networking for more than three years. Even so, 1944 saw a short film called "Patrolling the Ether" broadcast simultaneously over three stations as an experiment.

• 4. The American Networks Take Shape

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  AT&T completed its first postwar cable addition in February 1946, a 225-mile link between New York City and Washington, D.C. The DuMont Television Network, which had been running experimental broadcasts before the war, moved quickly: what Newsweek called "the country's first permanent commercial television network" launched on the 15th of August 1946, connecting New York City with Washington. NBC countered by launching what it described as "the world's first regularly operating television network" on the 27th of June 1947, serving New York City, Philadelphia, Schenectady, and Washington, with Baltimore and Boston added later that same year. CBS and ABC joined DuMont and NBC in 1948. In January 1949, DuMont's WDTV in Pittsburgh signed on and finally connected the Midwest and East Coast networks by coaxial cable. By 1951, all four networks stretched from coast to coast, carried on AT&T Long Lines' new nationwide microwave radio relay network. At first each network broadcast only a few hours of programming a week to affiliates, mostly between 8:00 and 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time. As programming hours expanded, the Federal Communications Commission grew concerned that local television might vanish. The result was the Prime Time Access Rule, which capped how much of the schedule networks could claim and was intended to encourage local production. In practice, most local stations preferred to buy syndicated programs rather than produce their own. DuMont itself shut down in 1956.

• 5. Fox and the Network Wars

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  The Fox Broadcasting Company, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, launched on the 9th of October 1986 after purchasing the television assets of Metromedia. By 1994 it had risen to the status of the fourth major network, alongside ABC, CBS, and NBC. 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 an alliance between Chris-Craft Industries and Paramount Television. Viacom, Paramount's parent, later acquired first half and then all of UPN. In September 2006, The CW launched as a consolidation of the two weaker networks, taking the higher-rated programs from The WB and UPN onto a single schedule. MyNetworkTV launched at the same time, built from affiliates of the two shuttered networks that had not affiliated with The CW. The CW now provides fifteen hours of primetime programming each week plus three hours on Saturdays, while MyNetworkTV supplies ten hours of primetime programming weekly, with affiliated stations filling the remaining hours primarily from syndicated sources. Cable and satellite providers pay networks a per-subscriber carriage fee; the highest such charge belongs to ESPN, which commands more than $5.00 per subscriber from cable and satellite providers.

• 6. Broadcasting Around the World

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  The BBC opened what it called the world's first regular high-definition television service on the 2nd of November 1936, transmitting from a 405-line transmitter at Alexandra Palace. Experimental television had begun in the UK in 1929, using an electromechanical 30-line system developed by John Logie Baird, with limited regular broadcasts under that system starting in 1934. The BBC's advertising-funded arm, BBC Studios, now employs 23,000 people worldwide. Commercial broadcasting in the UK arrived on the 22nd of September 1955, establishing a second network. Rather than a single company owning all the local channels, each local area had its own independently owned station; these channels together formed the ITV network. Italy ran its first regular electronic television transmissions from July 1939 to May 1940 through the state-owned EIAR, and the post-war RAI began regular transmissions on the 3rd of January 1954. Silvio Berlusconi's Fininvest company emerged in the 1980s, eventually controlling three major channels: Rete 4, Canale 5, and Italia 1. In the Soviet Union, the first national television network launched on the 7th of July 1938 when Petersburg's Channel 5 of Leningrad Television became a union-wide network. Sweden had a single broadcaster, the public SVT, from 1956 until the early 1990s; TV4 became Sweden's first commercial terrestrial network in 1991. Brazil's TV Globo, founded in 1965, grew into the largest media conglomerate in the country, spanning television, radio, print, and the internet.

• 7. How Networks Actually Work

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  Author Tim P. Vos, in his abstract A Cultural Explanation of Early Broadcast, found that policymakers did not expressly intend to create a broadcast order dominated by commercial networks. Legislative attempts were actually made to limit the preferred position that commercial networks had come to occupy. Within the industry, professionals draw careful distinctions between a network, a channel, and a station, even when those terms have become interchangeable for everyday viewers in countries where transmitters function mainly as large repeater stations. One internal distinction concerns whether a network's master control has the technical and administrative capability to take over an affiliate's programming in real-time; the clearest example of when this matters is during national breaking news events. Modern network operations centers rely on broadcast automation for most tasks, using atomic time derived from Global Positioning Systems to keep programming perfectly synchronized upstream and downstream. In North America, cable and satellite services are often branded as channels rather than networks because they operate as singular entities with no affiliates at all, distributed directly to the public by cable or direct-broadcast satellite providers. Canada's Broadcasting Act defines a network as any operation where control over programming schedules of one or more broadcasting undertakings is delegated to another entity, and only three national over-the-air networks are currently licensed under that definition by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission: CBC Television in English, Ici Radio-Canada Télé in French, TVA in French, and APTN, which focuses on Indigenous peoples. The Canadian network CTV relinquished its network license in 2001 after acquiring most of its affiliates, making the formal license structurally redundant.

• 8. Regional Voices and Local Breaks

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  In New Zealand, programmes and news footage in the 1960s were distributed between the four main television stations by mail: a programme airing in one region would be mailed to another region for broadcast the following week. A network was not finally established until 1969, when the same programmes began being relayed to all regions simultaneously. Those four stations were AKTV2 in Auckland, WNTV1 in Wellington, CHTV3 in Christchurch, and DNTV2 in Dunedin. The public broadcaster TVNZ previously operated a non-commercial service called TVNZ 7, which ceased in June 2012. In Australia, rural television markets began to aggregate beginning in 1989, allowing small rural networks to broadcast across entire states and become full-time affiliates of a metropolitan network. The original commercial networks in Australia were built around channel numbers: TCN-9 in Sydney, GTV-9 in Melbourne, and their counterparts formed what became the Nine Network, while VHF channels 7 and 10 organized the Seven Network and Network 10. Local stations across many countries retain the ability to break from network programming to insert local commercials, station identifications, and emergency alerts, while some opt for what is called regional variation, running entirely separate local schedules. In the Philippines, provincial and regional stations typically relay the broadcast of their parent network's flagship station based in the Mega Manila area, making the terms network, station, and channel practically synonymous in everyday use, a pattern that directly mirrors what the source notes about countries dominated by centrally originated content.