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Network Television
- Thread starter TVCOOL
- Start date
Any time the network gives time back, it's like handing the stations a big pile of money. Would you give someone a big pile of money if you didn't have to?
I'm sure the stations would love to have an extra hour for news in prime time, but a part of me thinks they'd find a way to run some syndication from someone else.
I'm sure the stations would love to have an extra hour for news in prime time, but a part of me thinks they'd find a way to run some syndication from someone else.
Fox never HAD a 10PM hour, so they had nothing to give back. By the time Fox launched, 10PM news was a normal occurrence, and many affiliates Fox was chasing after didn't want to give that up. I had originally expected Fox to "take" the 10PM hour back when they became a valuable network (around the time they got the NFL, but before they owned a lot of their affiliates) but it never happened. Now, you see the opposite happening with Fox O&O stations, they see more money in local news and have increased local news around the country on stations they owned. The local affiliate, which had 1 hour of news back when Fox launched, now has over 9 hours a day of news programming between the main and "+" channels, and over 11 hours of local programming per day total.
Best I can tell, the major networks consistently programmed the 10 PM Eastern (9 Central) hour back in the 1949-50 season. There were exceptions. One or more networks sometimes had one or two nights a week when they didn't program 10:30-11:00. That really seemed to vary widely and from season to season.
I remember in the early 70s, our local NBC station, then called WBAP, aired The Amazing Kreskin at 9:30 on Fridays. But that was the exception.
As far as a network giving up that hour? Not likely, since those sorts of things don't change often. But since NBC and CBS (like Fox) own a lot of local stations, they might see a chance to make more money in that hour with local news, so anything is possible.
Back when NBC moved Jay Leno to 10P/9P, I believe at least one affiliate threatened to delay that show and do a local newscast at 10:00.
Not as much as you think. The networks take a lot of that money.
That's the whole reason you're seeing affiliates add so many newscasts... 4PM, 4:30 AM, etc. They get ALL of the commercial inventory during the newscasts.
I get what the stations want. But the issue in the OP is the network just giving the 10PM hour back to the stations. What's the advantage to the network? The network division has its own structure, with its own president, and his bonus is based on the money his division makes. Giving that money to the owned stations division doesn't help the network division.
Essentially forever. All four networks programmed the 10pm hour in 1951, at least 5 nights a week.
What was the forth network in 1951?
Dumont Network. It was originally the second TV Network behind NBC back in the early days, but had poor (mostly UHF) affiliates in a time when UHF was a new technology that most TV's couldn't tune to.
I believe they went under in 1956. (Edited to correct date)
If the networks give up time to their affiliates they are unlikely to ever get it back.
It was 1956. They had only two affiliates left after everyone who had it either as primary or secondary dropped it.
Thanks for clarifying. It sounds like it kinda whimpered out, cancelling most programming months or even a year earlier because it couldn't pay the bills. Poor affiliation agreements, and only having a few strong affiliates probably didn't help.
It also sounds like the "big three" networks may have conspired to keep them from becoming a contender. Certainly would explain why, for 30 years the only TV networks we had were the ones born out of radio networks. Of course, many of the O&O and affiliates of Dumont would later be used to start the "Fox" network, so some see Fox as the successor to Dumont. I think where Fox was able to be successful is that they had the financial backing of a major studio (through ownership, vs just an agreement like Dumont had with Paramount.)
Not exactly. First of all, ABC was hardly a big network at the time. ABC was also partners with a part of Paramount, United Paramount Theaters. In fact, Leonard Goldenson, the founder of ABC, was the president of UPT. Paramount also had its own TV network.
The other player at the time was the federal government, and they imposed a bunch of regulations on Paramount and the networks that made it difficult for a company like Dumont to compete. Did the networks "conspire" with the government? The history mainly points to NBC's David Sarnoff, who did all kinds of anti-competitive things on a number of levels. But it's all very complicated, and there were a number of reasons why Dumont failed.
One major problem that helped kill Dumont was Paramount's investment in the company, going back before the war. Paramount subsidiaries owned KTLA in LA and WBKB in Chicago. Neither was ever a Dumont affiliate (which were KNXT, and later, KTTV in LA and WGN-TV in Chicago), but the FCC considered them to be Dumont O&Os because of Paramount's ownership stake. This meant that Dumont itself could only own 3 VHF stations, instead of the 5 normally allowed at the time. By the time Paramount spun off UPT and it merged with ABC, the Dumont network was already dying.
I agree, and the other issue was distribution. At the time, national distribution was on AT&T Longlines. There weren't enough facilities to accommodate four networks. By the time Fox came along, distribution was on satellite.
A few were. But a great many Du Mont affiliates went off the air at some point in the 1950s because of a lack of UHF sets. I would guess around half of the UHF Du Mont stations fell into that category.
In some cases, those allocations were brought back to life in the 70s and 80s to join NET/PBS/Fox.
Which was 2 stations
WNYW New York
WTTG Washington DC (still has the same call sign today as back in the 40s)
To get technical, it was the former Dumont Corporation and its two remaining stations, WABD (WNEW-TV, WNYW) New York and WTTG Washington that were reorganized into Metropolitan Broadcasting, later Metromedia. Over the years, they'd bought and sold stations in several markets. By 1986, they owned stations in LA (KTTV) and Chicago (WFLD), which is what Fox needed in order to get its network started.
So that means that Fox Television Stations, Inc. is a direct descendant of the Allen B. Dumont Corporation, even if the two networks technically aren't related, other than NFL Football airing on both networks.
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