Earliest movie studios to sell theatrical film packages to television?

[Ultimajock]

...I'm curious, what studios were the earliest to release their theatrical backlog to television syndication? I know certain titles were held back for decades (RKO didn't send out Citizen Kane to even its own O&Os until after William Randolph Hearst died, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer kept Gone With the Wind off TV until the mid-'70s), but I see in a Thanksgiving Day 1948 listing for Boston that WBZ-TV/4 ran the 1941 United Artists release Lydia with Merle Oberon and Joseph Cotten that afternoon. I also recall, at the beginning of Martin Scorsese's documentary My Voyage to Italy, he comments that the first Italian-language films he ever saw were the ones that his parents would watch with family members (I assume these were English-subtitled prints) on New York television in '48 and '49; I've since been told that WPIX-TV/11 was the likely station they tuned in, and many of the post-War Italian productions were distributed by both Hollywood studios (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had Paisan, RKO handled Stromboli) and independent distributors like Joseph Burstyn & Arthur Mayer (they owned US rights to Bicycle Thief, Open City and, partially and temporarily, Paisan)...

 

[Ultimajock]

...I know Walt Disney allowed the BBC free rein of his cartoon catalogue before World War II -- Mickey's Gala Premier was running on BBC Television when the order came through to shut the entire station down indefinitely on 1 September 1939 -- but (a) that was a cartoon short, and I don't think his only feature film by that time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, had been part of that package, and (b) that was British TV, and I'm curious about American TV access to features here...

 

[K.M. Richards]

There was a lot of discussion about this in the pages of Television Digest as new stations came on the air in 1952 after the "freeze" ... because those stations had a lot of airtime to fill.

I went ahead and did a search at David Gleason's site for you, and came up with 129 hits between 1950 and 1963. Perhaps reading these will start to answer your question:
http://www.americanradiohistory.com...+1948"&zoom_page=1&zoom_per_page=100&zoom_cat[]=1&zoom_cat[]=2&zoom_and=1&zoom_xml=0&zoom_sort=2

As near as I can tell, Paramount had released a few titles as early as August, 1951.

 

[JeffM]

Some of the earliest sales to TV would include the Hopalong Cassidy features which William Boyd had bought from Paramount and released to TV himself; Hal Roach's Laurel and Hardy films (shorts and features,) and packages of black and white cartoons, no longer desirable for theatrical use, by Warner Bros. and Walter Lantz, both of them handled for TV by Guild Films. All of these were available between the late 1940's and early 50's. Columbia's Screen Gems division was probably the first major studio to distribute their own product for TV, with packages of "B" Western features, serial cliffhangers, and cartoons available in the early 50's.