Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: When was Sony Pictures Television established?
Sony Pictures Television Inc. (or SPT) is an American television production and distribution studio founded in 2002 as the successor to Columbia TriStar Television. Based in Culver City, it is a division of Sony Entertainment's Sony Pictures Entertainment and a unit of the Japanese conglomerate Sony.
SPT's history goes back to 1947, when Pioneer Telefilms was founded by Ralph Cohn, whose father Jack and uncle Harry co-founded Columbia Pictures. Pioneer was bought by Columbia and renamed in November 1948, reincorporated as Columbia Pictures Television on May 6, 1974,
and merged with sister studio TriStar Television (formed in 1986 and relaunched in 1991) to form Columbia TriStar Television on February 21, 1994.
On May 7, 1992, Sony Pictures Entertainment joined forces with the United Video Satellite Group to launch Game Show Channel, which was set to launch in 1993. The announcement of the channel was made by SPE president Mel Harris. Sony Pictures' holdings included those by Merv Griffin Enterprises and Barris Industries, Inc. SPE was in competition with The Family Channel in launching a game show-oriented channel when The Family Channel announced the launch of its own service called Game Channel.
The Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) began conducting research to "unlock the fundamental mechanism of video and sound interactions with the five human senses" in 1964, after the Tokyo Olympics. NHK set out to create an HDTV system that ended up scoring much higher in subjective tests than NTSC's previously dubbed "HDTV". This new system, NHK Color, created in 1972, included 1125 lines, a 5:3 aspect ratio and 60 Hz refresh rate. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), headed by Charles Ginsburg, became the testing and study authority for HDTV technology in the international theater. SMPTE would test HDTV systems from different companies from every conceivable perspective, but the problem of combining the different formats plagued the technology for many years.
"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" was released by Sony Pictures Releasing under its Columbia Pictures label on December 14, 2018. In April 2015, Sony had made its first official announcement that a new animated Spider-Man film was in development, scheduling release for July 20, 2018. It would be the first animated Spider-Man feature film, and would be independent of the timelines of other Spider-Man universe films. At the end of 2015, the release date was changed to December 21, and two years later, moved up one week. Sony premiered the film at the Regency Village Theater in Los Angeles on December 1, 2018, and included tributes to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
Spelling Television Inc. was a television production company that went through several name changes. It was originally called Aaron Spelling Productions, then Spelling Entertainment Inc. and eventually part of Spelling Entertainment Group. The company produced popular shows such as "The Love Boat", "Dynasty", "Beverly Hills, 90210", "7th Heaven", "Melrose Place" and "Charmed". The company was founded by television producer Aaron Spelling on October 25, 1965. The company is currently an in-name-only unit of CBS Television Studios. A related company, Spelling-Goldberg Productions, co-existed during a portion of the same time period and produced other well-known shows such as "Charlie's Angels", "Starsky & Hutch", and "Fantasy Island" but these series are not part of the modern day library now owned by CBS. Another related company, The Douglas S. Cramer Company co-existed during a portion of the same time period (held by Douglas S. Cramer, who held the position as Executive VP), produced shows like "Wonder Woman", "Joe and Sons", and "Bridget Loves Bernie" and TV movies like "", but these series are almost neither series or TV movies are not part of the modern day library now owned by CBS, almost nor airing on ABC.
Pixar () is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio is best known for its CGI-animated feature films created with PhotoRealistic RenderMan, its own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface used to generate high-quality images. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the computer division of Lucasfilm before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986 with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. Pixar and Disney had a seven feature agreement that allowed Disney to distribute the films with Disney owing the character rights. With the success of "Toy Story 2" in 1999, then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs began to disagree on how Pixar should be run and the terms of their continued relationship. Eisner claimed that Toy Story 2 would not count towards the "original" film count of the agreement. Jobs announced in January 2004 that Pixar would not renew their agreement with Disney and would seek out other distributors for releases starting in 2006. In 2004, Disney Circle 7 Animation was formed as a CG animation studio to create sequels to the Disney-owned Pixar properties. In Late January 2006, new Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jobs agreed to have Disney purchase Pixar which led to Disney closing Circle 7.
Between 1999 and 2005, Studio Ghibli was a subsidiary brand of Tokuma Shoten, however, that partnership ended on April 2005 when Studio Ghibli was spun off from Tokuma Shoten, and was re-established as an independent company with relocated headquarters.
Len Amato, producer and as the president of Spring Creek Productions, was appointed HBO Films senior vice president in March 2007. In 2008, Picturehouse was discontinued with distribution being handled by WB's main distribution arm. HBO Films exited the theatrical film market with Picturehouse's closure. With Callender leaving to form his own production company in late 2008, no division president is appointed with department heads becoming president of their departments, Kary Antholis at HBO Miniseries, and Amato at HBO Films. Both answered to president of programming group/West Coast operations, Michael Lombardo.The films produced by the company have garnered hundreds of Primetime Emmy Awards, 694 nominations with 162 wins, and Golden Globe Awards. HBO Films productions have won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie every year from 1993 to 2015, except for four years. "Elephant" is the first film produced by HBO Films to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Development of the format started in 1988, when Nintendo signed a contract with Sony to produce a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. The system was to be compatible with existing SNES titles as well as titles released for the Super Disc format. Under their agreement, Sony would develop and retain control over the Super Disc format, with Nintendo thus effectively ceding a large amount of control of software licensing to Sony. To counter this, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi sent Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa and executive Howard Lincoln to Europe to negotiate a more favorable contract with Philips, Sony's industry rival. At the June 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, Sony announced its SNES-compatible cartridge/CD console, the "PlayStation". The next day, Nintendo revealed its partnership with Philips at the show—a surprise to the entire audience, including Sony.
While Nintendo and Sony attempted to sort out their differences, between two and three hundred prototypes of the PlayStation were created, and software for the system was being developed. In 1992, a deal was reached allowing Sony to produce SNES-compatible hardware, with Nintendo retaining control and profit over the games, but the two organizations never repaired the rift between them and by the next year, Sony had refocused its efforts on developing its own console for the next generation of consoles.
In 1983, Nolan Bushnell founded a new computer-guided animation studio called Kadabrascope as a subsidiary of his Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres company (PTT), which was founded in 1977. Only one major project was made out of the new studio, an animated Christmas movie for NBC starring Chuck E. Cheese and other PTT mascots. The animation movement would be made using tweening instead of traditional cel animation. After the North American Video Game Crash of 1983, Bushnell started selling some subsidiaries of PTT to keep the business afloat. Sente Technologies (another division, was founded to have games distributed in PTT stores) was sold to Bally Games and Kadabrascope was sold to Lucasfilm. The Kadabrascope assets were combined with the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs' first jobs was under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to focus on PTT. PTT would later go bankrupt in 1985 and be acquired by ShowBiz Pizza Place.
The relationship between Sony and Nintendo started when Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi became interested in working with video games after seeing his daughter play games on Nintendo's Famicom video game console. He took on a contract at Sony for developing hardware that would drive the audio subsystem of Nintendo's next console, the Super NES. Kutaragi secretly developed the chip, known as the Sony SPC 700. As Sony was uninterested in the video game business, most of his superiors did not approve of the project, but Kutaragi found support in Sony executive Norio Ohga and the project was allowed to continue. The success of the project spurred Nintendo to enter into a partnership with Sony to develop both a CD-ROM add-on for the Super NES and a Sony-branded console that would play both SNES cartridges, as well as titles released for the new Super Disc format.
Television became available in crude experimental forms in the late 1920s, but it would still be several years before the new technology would be marketed to consumers. After World War II, an improved form of black-and-white TV broadcasting became popular in the United States and Britain, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the US and most other developed countries. The availability of multiple types of archival storage media such as Betamax, VHS tape, local disks, DVDs, flash drives, high-definition Blu-ray Discs, and cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material—such as movies—at home on their own time schedule. For many reasons, especially the convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now occurs on the cloud. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television (SDTV) (576i, with 576 interlaced lines of resolution and 480i) to high-definition television (HDTV), which provides a resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats: 1080p, 1080i and 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, iPlayer, Hulu, Roku and Chromecast.
Power Rangers is an American entertainment and merchandising franchise built around a live-action superhero television series, based on the Japanese tokusatsu franchise "Super Sentai". Produced first by Saban Entertainment, second by BVS Entertainment, later by SCG Power Rangers and today by Hasbro, the "Power Rangers" television series takes much of its footage from the "Super Sentai" television series, produced by Toei Company. The first "Power Rangers" entry, "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers", debuted on August 28, 1993, and helped launch the Fox Kids programming block of the 1990s, during which it catapulted into popular culture along with a line of action figures and other toys by Bandai. By 2001, the media franchise had generated over $6 billion in toy sales.
The station first signed on the air on December 14, 1952 as KROD-TV; it was the first television station to sign on in the El Paso market. The station was founded by Dorrance Roderick, owner of KROD radio (600 AM) and the "El Paso Times". The station's original studio facilities were located on Wyoming Avenue (off I-10) in El Paso. Early programs on the station included the children's shows "Red Brown and Anna Lee" and "Bozo's Big Top", and wrestling program "Mitchell's Mat Time". The station has been a CBS affiliate since its sign-on; however, it maintained secondary affiliations with ABC and the DuMont Television Network until 1956. It lost the ABC affiliation when KILT (then on channel 13, now KVIA-TV on channel 7) signed on in September and lost DuMont as a result of the network's decision to cease operations the previous month. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. Roderick sold the station to Trigg-Vaughn of Dallas, Texas in 1959.
Pixar Animation Studios, commonly referred to as Pixar (), is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California, that is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, owned by the Walt Disney Company. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder. Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion by converting each share of Pixar stock to 2.3 shares of Disney stock, a transaction that resulted in Jobs becoming Disney's largest single shareholder at the time. Pixar is best known for CGI-animated feature films created with RenderMan, Pixar's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface, used to generate high-quality images.
Since "Stargate SG-1" was expensive to produce, MGM arranged an agreement with Showtime that "SG-1" could air in syndication six months after their premiere on Showtime. All 22 Fox stations aired the first seasons after their Showtime debut, providing a clearance of 41% of the United States. The Sci Fi Channel made its largest single programming acquisition of $150 million in 1998 by buying the exclusive basic cable rights to the MGM package "Stargate SG-1", "The Outer Limits" and "". Showtime decided to end its association with "Stargate SG-1" at the end of Season 5, saying that the show still had a sizeable viewership but could no longer draw new subscribers due to its availability in syndication.
The beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. To some, it began with "The Jazz Singer", which was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films, as sound was introduced to feature films. To others, the era began in 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended. Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960s adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, and biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films; Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years; Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount Pictures; and director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth Century Fox. Similarly, actors were mostly contract players. Film historians and critics note that it took about a decade for films to adapt to sound and return to the level of artistic quality of the silents, which it did in the late 1930s.
In June 2010, Marvel Entertainment set up a television division within Marvel Studios, headed up by Jeph Loeb as Executive Vice President, under which Marvel Animation would be operated. On October 18, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures acquired the distribution rights for "The Avengers" and "Iron Man 3" from Paramount Pictures with Paramount's logo and credit remaining on the films.
The Chronicle Publishing Company was a print and broadcast media corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California that was in operation from 1865 until 2000. Owned for the whole of its existence by the de Young family, CPC was most notable for owning the namesake "San Francisco Chronicle" newspaper and KRON-TV, the longtime National Broadcasting Company (NBC) affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose) television media market.
Pixar got its start in 1974 when New York Institute of Technology's (NYIT) founder Alexander Schure, who was also the owner of a traditional animation studio, established the Computer Graphics Lab (CGL), recruited computer scientists who shared his ambitions about creating the world's first computer-animated film. Edwin Catmull and Malcolm Blanchard were the first to be hired and were soon joined by Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco some months later, which were the four original members of the Computer Graphics Lab. Schure kept pouring money into the computer graphics lab, an estimated $15 million, giving the group everything they desired and driving NYIT into serious financial troubles. Eventually, the group realized they needed to work in a real film studio in order to reach their goal. Francis Ford Coppola then invited Smith to his house for a three-day media conference, where Coppola and George Lucas shared their visions for the future of digital moviemaking.
And when Lucas approached them and offered them a job at his studio, six employees decided to move over to Lucasfilm. During the following months, they gradually resigned from CGL, found temporary jobs for about a year to avoid making Schure suspicious, before they joined The Graphics Group at Lucasfilm.
Sony Channel was made possible after Sony Pictures Television acquired channel 157 on Sky's EPG, previously owned by Film 24, in November 2010. A one-hour timeshift channel was also available from launch after the purchase of Open Access 3's Sky EPG slot on channel 190. Both Film 24 and Open Access 3 closed on 4 April 2011, to make way for previews of Sony Entertainment Television. On 15 December 2011, Sony Entertainment Television was added to Virgin Media. On 2 April 2012, Sony Entertainment Television +1 moved to Current TV's former Sky EPG slot on channel 183, with channel 190 used to launch Men&Movies +1. On 3 July 2012, Sony Entertainment Television +1 moved to channel 181.
BT agreed a deal with Sony Pictures Television to offer its Sony Entertainment Television and Sony Retro programming on-demand on BT Vision from 1 March 2010. The move marked Sony Entertainment Television's debut in the UK market, over a year ahead of the launch of the Sony Entertainment Television channel. Sony Entertainment Television and Sony Retro programming also appeared on TalkTalk TV during the YouView platform launch in 2012, but was later removed.
Columbia Pictures Television, Inc. (abbreviated as CPT) was launched on May 6, 1974 by Columbia Pictures as an American television production and distribution studio. It is the second name of the Columbia Pictures television division Screen Gems (SG). For 26 years, the company was active from 1974 until 2001, when it was folded into Columbia TriStar Television (which is currently known as Sony Pictures Television), a merger between Columbia Pictures Television and TriStar Television. A separate entity of CPT continues to exist on paper as an intellectual property holder, and under the moniker CPT Holdings (the initials standing for Columbia Pictures Television) to hold the copyright for the TV show "The Young and the Restless", as well as old incarnations from the company's television library such as "What's Happening!!".
Sony Pictures Releasing is an American film distributor owned by Sony. Established in 1994 as a successor to Triumph Releasing Corporation, the company handles theatrical distribution, marketing and promotion for films produced and released by Sony Pictures Entertainment, including Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Classics, Stage 6 Films, Sony Pictures Animation, Triumph Films, among others. It is a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group. It also has an international division called Sony Pictures Releasing International, which from 1991 until 2005 was known as Columbia TriStar Film Distributors International.
On May 28, 2015, TriStar Television was re-launched as a boutique production label for Sony Pictures Television. The revived studio will be run by Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs after being in-name-only for 15 years. The first new series will be "The Good Girls Revolt" and is set to be piloted for Amazon. On September 28, 2015, Steve Mosko was promoted to chairman of SPT. He held the position as president of the television studio since 2000 when it was known as Columbia TriStar Television.