Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: When did NBC begin?
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial terrestrial television network that is a flagship property of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. The network is headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, with additional major offices near Los Angeles (at 10 Universal City Plaza), Chicago (at the NBC Tower) and Philadelphia (at the Comcast Technology Center). The network is one of the Big Three television networks. NBC is sometimes referred to as the "Peacock Network", in reference to its stylized peacock logo, introduced in 1956 to promote the company's innovations in early color broadcasting. It became the network's official emblem in 1979.
An NFL game was televised for the first time when NBC broadcast a Brooklyn Dodgers–Philadelphia Eagles game. The experimental broadcast was broadcast only to viewers in New York and Albany; regular broadcasting of NFL games would not begin until 1951.
From 1947 to 1956 and again in 1965, NBC only aired the All-Star Game (beginning in 1950) and World Series. From 1957 to 1989, the network aired the Saturday afternoon "Game of the Week" (or a variation of it prior to 1966, when NBC did not hold the exclusive over-the-air television rights). From 1994 to 1995, NBC aired games under a joint broadcasting venture with Major League Baseball and ABC called The Baseball Network. From 1996 to 2000, the network's league coverage was reduced to postseason games (three Division Series games in prime time, the American League Championship Series in even-numbered years, and the National League Championship Series and World Series in odd-numbered years), as well as the All-Star Game in even-numbered years (during years when NBC did not hold the rights to the World Series).
In early 1996, shortly after WGBA picked up the NBC affiliation, then-owner Aries Telecommunications announced plans to start a full-fledged news department for the station. On July 19, 1996, during the start of NBC's coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympics, WGBA debuted its local newscasts, with a half-hour early-evening newscast at 6:00 p.m. on Mondays through Saturdays (the initial broadcast of that program on July 19 ran a special one-hour broadcast, leading into NBC's coverage of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Atlanta) and a late evening newscast at 10:00 p.m. seven nights a week. Ted O'Connell was WGBA's first news director; he was succeeded by Ashley Webster (now a journalist with Fox Business Network), who also served as weeknight co-anchor alongside Heather Hays (presently a main anchor at Fox owned-and-operated station KDFW in Dallas-Fort Worth). Eventually as the operation grew, the station added newscasts on weekday mornings, weekdays at noon and at 5:00 p.m.
The first serious attempt at dedicated television news broadcasts in the United States was by CBS. Upon becoming commercial station WCBW (now WCBS-TV) in 1941, the pioneer New York CBS television station broadcast two daily news programs, at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. weekdays, anchored by Richard Hubbell. Most of the newscasts featured Hubbell reading a script with only occasional cutaways to a map or still photograph.
NBC intended to make Chicago a major hub for its radio networks. In 1930, the network leased more than 66,000 square feet of space in the newly completed Merchandise Mart with plans to move 50 radio programs which were presently originating in New York to their new Chicago headquarters. In 1931, NBC was able to purchase Chicago radio station WENR from financially troubled Samuel Insull. Later in the year, it bought WMAQ from the "Daily News". With the purchase of WMAQ, the network now owned a radio station in Chicago for their Blue Network (WENR) and their Red Network (WMAQ). While WMAQ was moved to NBC's new Merchandise Mart base of operations a few months after it was purchased, WENR remained at Chicago's Civic Opera House, where it was based when owned by Insull.
NBC News Channel is a news video and report feed service, similar to a wire service, providing pre-produced international, national and regional stories some with fronting reporters customized for NBC network affiliates. It is based in Charlotte, North Carolina with bureaus in New York City at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Washington, D.C. on North Capital Street NW, and in Los Angeles at the Brokaw News Center on the Universal Studios Hollywood Lot. Its headquarters in Charlotte are connected to the studios of Charlotte NBC affiliate WCNC-TV. NBC News Channel also served as the production base of "NBC Nightside" and "Canal de Noticias, NBC".
NHK's earliest forerunner was the founded in 1924 under the leadership of Count Gotō Shinpei. Tokyo Broadcasting Station, along with separate organizations in Osaka and Nagoya, began radio broadcasts in 1925. The three stations merged under the first incarnation of NHK in August 1926. NHK was modelled on the BBC of the United Kingdom, and the merger and reorganisation was carried out under the auspices of the pre-war Ministry of Communications. NHK's second radio network began in 1931, and the third radio network (FM) began in 1937.
When the AFL and the NFL officially merged in 1970, the combined league divided its teams into the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). It was then decided (officially announced on January 26, 1970) that CBS would televise all NFC teams (including playoff games) while NBC would carry games from all AFC teams. For interconference games, CBS would broadcast them if the visiting team was from the NFC and NBC would carry them when the visitors were from the AFC. This was in line with the NFL television blackout rules of the time, meaning that every televised game of a local NFL team would be on the same channel (at the time, home games were banned from local television regardless of sell-out status, while road games are required to be aired in the teams' primary media markets, and select neighboring markets as well, even if it is not the most popular team in the market). The two networks also divided up broadcast rights to the Super Bowl on a yearly rotation.
NBC broadcast the first televised National Football League (NFL) game when they carried the 22 October 1939 game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The same year, the first nationwide radio broadcast of an NFL championship game was carried on the Mutual Broadcasting System. While the NFL had weak television deals that ranked behind college football and even the Canadian Football League in the 1950s, the broadcast rights of the NFL would go on to become an important property following the 1958 NFL Championship and the later establishment of the American Football League in 1960. "Monday Night Football", "NFL on Fox", and "NBC Sunday Night Football" have changed the landscape of American football broadcasts, including the scheduling of the Super Bowl, transforming it from an afternoon broadcast into a primetime spectacle. The price for the NFL's broadcast rights has increased steadily over the past several decades, in part because of bidding wars between the numerous networks and the fear of losing stature due to the loss of NFL programming; as of the most recent contract the league nets annual fees of over $6 billion, or half of the league's overall revenue, from television rights alone. Four of the five major sports television units in the United States, and the four companies that control all of the major broadcast networks, currently own some NFL rights.
On July 1, 1952, WBAP-TV became among the first six television stations in the country (along with fellow NBC stations KPRC-TV in Houston, WOAI-TV in San Antonio, WKY-TV (now KFOR-TV) in Oklahoma City, KOTV (now a CBS affiliate) in Tulsa and WDSU in New Orleans) to begin transmitting network programming over a live microwave feed, inaugurated with a message by "Today Show" host Dave Garroway welcoming the stations in commencing live network telecasts. That decade, Channel 5 also became one of the first television stations to convert its local programming to color; the station's conversion to color broadcasts on May 15, 1954 was preceded by a dedication of its new production and master control facilities—which were upgraded specifically for color telecasting—from Carter and David Sarnoff, chairman of then-NBC parent RCA, that was broadcast on the station; this was followed by a three-hour block of programs produced in color, the longest broadcast of such programs ever attempted by a television station at that time. By 1955, WBAP-TV—which had earlier ordered RCA color television equipment in the fall of 1949, and became the first television station in Texas to broadcast NBC programs in color on April 9, 1954—had greatly increased the number of programs that it broadcast in color, televising the largest amount of programming produced in the format of any U.S. television station at the time.
After the war, expanded news programs appeared on the WCBW schedule—renamed WCBS-TV in 1946—first anchored by Milo Boulton, and later by Douglas Edwards. On May 3, 1948, Douglas Edwards began anchoring "CBS Television News", a regular 15-minute nightly newscast on the rudimentary CBS Television Network, including WCBS-TV. It aired every weeknight at 7:30 PM, and was the first regularly scheduled, network television news program featuring an anchor (as mentioned, the nightly Lowell Thomas NBC radio network newscast was simulcast on television locally on NBC's WNBT—now WNBC—for a time in the early 1940s and the previously mentioned Richard Hubbell, Ned Calmer, Everett Holles and Milo Boulton on WCBW in the early and mid-1940s, but these were local television broadcasts seen only in New York City). The NBC Television Network's regularly scheduled news offering at the time "NBC Television Newsreel" (premiered February 1948) was simply film with voice narration.
In April 1992, KJRH became the first Tulsa-area television station to relay its signal directly to a cable television system by fiber optics, after it activated a fiber cable link between the Peoria Avenue studios and the local headend facility of United Artists Cable (now operated by Cox Communications, which acquired successor Tele-Communications Inc.'s Tulsa cable operations in March 2000) near 44th Street and South Sheridan Avenue – the construction of which was completed weeks prior on March 19. KJRH was not affected by a 1994 affiliation deal between Scripps and its ABC affiliates, as Allbritton Communications (who then owned KTUL) was in the process of signing a group-wide affiliation deal with ABC at the time. In November 1997, KJRH changed its on-air branding to "2 NBC" for general purposes and "2 News NBC" for its local newscasts. The station changed its branding to "[Channel] 2 Works for You" in January 2001, following the implementation of a new graphics package that placed the current red and white "square 2" logo (which had first been introduced in May 2001 as a time-temperature bug shown during local newscasts, syndicated programming and intermittently during some NBC network shows) into full-time usage.
NBC ordered a full season of "Homicide: Life on the Street" before a pilot episode was even produced. Planned as a mid-season replacement, the network ordered six episodes for their 1993 winter season, and then ordered another three after watching the completed pilot episode. The network had been consistently placing third behind their competitor networks ABC and CBS, and was suffering due to the loss of several successful shows in 1992, including "The Cosby Show", "The Golden Girls" and "Matlock", as well as the upcoming end of "Cheers" in 1993. NBC had tried appealing to audiences in their 20s through several comedies, but those efforts proved unsuccessful and the network decided to focus on high-quality dramas like "Homicide". NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield considered it the most promising new series of the season.
In Japan, the main public broadcaster is the NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). The broadcaster was set up in 1926 and was modelled on the British Broadcasting Company, the precursor to the British Broadcasting Corporation created in 1927. Much like the BBC, NHK is funded by a "receiving fee" from every Japanese household, with no commercial advertising and the maintenance of a position of strict political impartiality. However, rampant non-payment by a large amount of households has led the receiving fee to become something of a political issue. NHK runs two national terrestrial TV stations (NHK General and NHK Educational) and two satellite only services (NHK BS1 and NHK BS Premium services). NHK also runs 3 national radio services and a number of international radio and television services, akin to the BBC World Service. NHK has also been an innovator in television, developing the world's first high definition television technology in 1964 and launching high definition services in Japan in 1981.
Following Canary's departure, Frizzell's character accompanied Jamie Hunter to the Ponderosa and became the Cartwright's foreman.Initially, "Bonanza" aired on Saturday evenings opposite "Dick Clark's Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show" and "John Gunther's High Road" on ABC, and "Perry Mason" on CBS. "Bonanza"s initial ratings were respectable, often coming in behind Mason but ahead of the ABC line-up. Ironically, executives considered canceling the show before its premiere because of its high cost. NBC kept it because "Bonanza" was one of the first series to be filmed and broadcast in color, including scenes of picturesque Lake Tahoe, Nevada, although most of the episodes were obviously filmed on soundstages until the seasons near the end of the series. NBC's corporate parent, Radio Corporation of America (RCA), used the show to spur sales of RCA-manufactured color television sets (RCA was also the primary sponsor of the series during its first two seasons).
A new Broadcasting Act ("Hōsō Hō") was enacted in 1950, which made NHK a listener-supported independent corporation and simultaneously opened the market for commercial broadcasting in Japan. NHK started television broadcasting in the same year, followed by its Educational TV channel in 1959 and color television broadcasts in 1960.
HBO's first sports broadcast was of a New York Rangers-Vancouver Canucks NHL game, transmitted to a Service Electric cable system in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on November 8, 1972; the channel continued to air NHL hockey games through the mid-1970s. HBO has long been known for its telecasts of boxing matches (which usually air on Saturday nights every two to three weeks on average), including those shown on its flagship sports program "HBO World Championship Boxing". On September 30, 1975, the "Thrilla in Manila" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier aired on HBO and was the first program on the pay cable network to be broadcast via satellite. That same year, HBO began airing coverage of Wimbledon; it held contractual rights to coverage of the tennis tournament through 1999, when it lost the rights to sister network TNT (owned by Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting System subsidiary).
The site was founded in 1996 as a 50-50 venture between NBCUniversal and Microsoft at the same time as the two companies formed a separate joint venture for the cable news network MSNBC. Although they shared the same name, msnbc.com and MSNBC maintained separate corporate structures and news operations, with msnbc.com headquartered on the West Coast on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington and MSNBC in the NBC headquarters in New York. Microsoft divested its stake in the MSNBC channel in 2005, and divested its stake in msnbc.com in July 2012.
Goldenson orchestrated the merger of United Paramount Theatres with ABC in 1953 (after Paramount was ordered to spin it off in the wake of "United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.", a 1948 decree of the U.S. Supreme Court). ABC was originally formed in 1943 in the wake of an earlier Supreme Court decree effectively ordering the spinoff of the largely secondary-status "Blue Network" from its then-parent, NBC; its buyer, industrialist Edward J. Noble, tried to build ABC into a competitive Broadcasting company, but by 1951 was rumored to be on the verge of selling the nearly bankrupt operation to CBS, whose management apparently wanted ABC's critically important owned-and-operated television stations.
In 1994, WLUK-TV (channel 11) and three other stations owned by Burnham Broadcasting were sold to SF Broadcasting (owned as a partnership between Savoy Communications and Fox). As part of the purchase and through Fox's ownership of the group, SF signed a group affiliation deal to switch its stations to Fox; this enabled WLUK to become the Packers' unofficial "home" station as Fox had acquired the television contract to the NFL's National Football Conference. On August 28, 1995, WGBA-TV switched its affiliation to NBC (and changed its on-air branding to "NBC 26"); the Fox affiliation moved to former NBC affiliate WLUK. As an NBC affiliate, it struggled to find a constant identity. Green Bay's other three stations have been on-the-air since the 1950s and had loyal audiences. Relief did not come until October 2004, when the Journal Broadcast Group bought it for $43.2 million after Aries Telecommunications sold the station. Journal had long wanted a station in Northeastern Wisconsin alongside its flagship station, WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, that market's NBC affiliate and long-dominant news station.
The Smurfs secured their place in North American pop culture in 1981, when the Saturday-morning cartoon series "The Smurfs", produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions in association with SEPP International S.A.R.L, aired on NBC from September 12, 1981 to December 2, 1989 (reruns until August 25, 1990). The show continued to air on the USA network until 1993, and on Cartoon Network until 2003. "The Smurfs" is still broadcast on the Boomerang channel throughout the United States. The show became a major success for NBC, spawning spin-off television specials on an almost yearly basis. "The Smurfs" was nominated multiple times for Daytime Emmy awards, and won Outstanding Children's Entertainment Series in 1982–1983. "The Smurfs" television show enjoyed continued success until 1990, when, after nearly a decade of success, NBC cancelled it due to decreasing ratings and plans to extend their "Today" morning show franchise to create a Saturday edition, although they did not do so until 1992 (two years later). The decreased ratings were the result of the network changing the format of the show, resulting in the final season featuring regular time travel with only a few Smurfs.
On January 7, 2016, NBC-OTVS President Valari Staab confirmed that NBC had declined to renew its affiliation with Boston-based WHDH, and that it planned to launch an owned-and-operated outlet to be known as NBC Boston on January 1, 2017. At the time, NBC did not announce which stations would be used to carry the new service over-the-air, and WHDH's owner Sunbeam Television sued NBCUniversal under the presumption that it planned to only use WNEU, contending that doing so would have considerably reduced the ability of viewers to receive the network over the air in Boston, thus bolstering the cable services provided by NBC's parent company Comcast in the city.
"We designed the building from the inside out, not the outside in,” said Loretta H. Cockrum, Foram’s founder, chairman and CEO. “We wanted the most efficient office building ever designed, with no wasted space or wasted energy. This is a building of the future more than a building of the present. A lot of love has gone into that building, and a lot of pride."
Ɯ was used in the Zhuang alphabet from 1957 to 1986 to represent the same vowel as in IPA; sometime before or in 1986, it was replaced with W.