 This is the SF Productions podcast network The following program is brought to you in living color from the pop culture bunker I'm Mindy and I'm mark you can check out our audio podcast how I got my wife to read comics on iTunes or on our website SF podcast network comm We're in the dog days of summer indeed, which means there's not a lot going on in pop culture So we're reaching back in history to tell you the story of the first major US TV network the national Broadcasting Company aka NBC It started as a business transaction AT&T created radio station WEAF to be used as a laboratory in 1922 Although it had regular programming but it about a laboratory so to try out different things with wired wireless Broadcasting and all this yeah Gotcha actually it was part of an embryonic radio network with other stations in Providence WJAR and Washington DC WCAP Meanwhile RCA was trying to sell radios and you needed programming to do that At Westinghouse and RCA shareholder had a new Jersey station called WJZ RCA wanted to have a network, but they needed AT&T's phone lines to do it and AT&T said nope by 1925 RCA ended up buying out WEAF and WCAP because AT&T had decided to concentrate on phone service and get out of the radio business And that included an agreement for use of those phone lines WCAP was merged with an existing RCA station WRC and announced a new radio network the national broadcasting company in 1926 The Network was owned by RCA 50% and General Electric who founded and owned RCA had 30% and Westinghouse had 20% By 1927 NBC was split into two separate networks WEAF was the flagship of NBC red with commercial aka sponsored programming WJZ was the flagship of NBC blue with sustaining aka non-sponsored programming Why the colors? It's either based on push pins. They used on a map Double-ended red and blue colored pencils. Yeah, one of those two They usually use push pins or they had these color pencils that somebody just had they're like I use that Rather quickly there were two more colors orange was the Pacific Coast Network carrying red shows And gold did the same for blue shows. That should be green. Oh, yeah Yeah, there was even a white network that used shortwave radio. These are all merged or dropped later in 1930 GE was charged with antitrust and forced to divest RCA NBC creating a separate company at that point RCA moved into Rockefeller Center, New York City and 30 Rock was born RCA's president David Sarnoff was reportedly one of the first telegraph operators to confirm the fate of the Titanic The classic three tones GEC became NBC's trademark literally in 1931 Supposedly the notes are not a reference to the general electric company, but it seems like quite the coincidence if they're not By the mid 30s the US FCC was looking into what had become a radio duopoly between NBC and CBS After years of investigations and appeals NBC was forced to divest either NBC red or NBC blue They sold the latter remember that was the sustaining network the non commercial network To Edward J. Noble the head of lifesavers. Yes, the candy It was renamed the American broadcasting company ABC NBC's first position in radio gave it the best and most powerful stations giving it a leg up over CBS for decades And it didn't hurt that they had the most prestigious set of talent Jack Benny Bob Hope Burns and Allen Toscan Edie's NBC Symphony Fiber McGee and Molly I like Fiber McGee and Molly, but this all changed in the late 40s with two words production company Tax attorneys proposed that radio stars create such mechanisms to be taxed at a lower corporate rate rather than the personal rate Many stars would hire themselves to the production company and pay themselves a dollar a year CBS was fine with this and began luring NBC stars over to them when NBC was asked about it David Sarnoff now General due to his work in radio and radar technology during the war said it was unpatriotic and refused of course Radio was on its way out RCA had been working on television since the beginning and it used its government connections to take over patents as they became available By 1939 RCA NBC introduced what we know as TV at the World's Fair with FDR giving an address and obviously the first president on TV Only about 1,100 people sought either lab technicians or early early early adopters Sets were on sale a year earlier from multiple vendors just an anticipation that NBC was going to start program So they wouldn't have gotten anything until this year You'd have a box in your house for a year that did nothing The first network TV program over experimental stations in New York City and Schenectady Who had a mountain tower and they picked it up from in the New York City station and just rebroadcast it Was in January 1940 a play called meet the wife Few more experiments later. They had the Republican National Convention in New York City. They were baseball games, etc NBC TV officially went live in July 1941 just in time for World War two when all TV programming was shut down Things started again by 1944 with the first regular schedule Including the voice of Firestone televiews, which was a spin-off of their radio series And they had a lucky break in 1947 when two New York teams the Yankees and the Dodgers were in the world series television sales boomed more firsts first TV star Melton Burrell 1948 movie theaters would supposedly close when he was on the first opera written for TV Amal and the Night Visitors 1951 first transcontinental broadcast 1951 made available due to the transcontinental cable until then West Coast stations would get what they called? kinescopes of East Coast shows and vice versa and that was pointing a film camera at a TV set and They're not very good quality First morning program the today show 1952 until then TV stations rarely went on the air until afternoon And then the first late night program that tonight show 1954 until then stations went off the air after prime time And at this point they were still going off the air at you know, right which they don't did night. Yeah Color TV was the next frontier NBC had a compatible color system Which was lower quality but could be seen on current black and white sets CBS used a color wheel in front of the screen to create what could have eventually been a better quality picture But required replacement of all existing equipment and sets Amazingly the FCC initially went with CBS, but RCA used their connections to flip the decision During this period the FCC froze all new station license requests Which gave NBC and CBS an even larger advantage over ABC who is still trying to build up a network and Dumont which was decimated by the decision and was gone by the mid fifties You can check out episode 99 for more details on Dumont and the other fourth networks NBC pushed color programming for decades when most people didn't even have color TV sets The peacock logo was introduced in 1956 when virtually no one could see the colors By 1965 though, they were the all-color network, although there were a few stragglers NBC started to have issues by the 1970s when an aging audience and bad decisions occurred on TV shows By 1975 none of the new shows that season got a pick up for a second season with one exception Saturday night live The peacock logo was dropped and replaced with a stylized M It would they don't worry the the peacock will be back by the early 80s Fred Silverman was lured over from ABC where he had taken that network from worst to first in a few years That happened in 1978 However, the man they called the man with the golden gut struck out with disasters like hello, larry Supertrain and pink lady and jeff Check out episode 96 for more on silverman In 1980 after spending 87 million dollars to get the olympic broadcast rights from ABC Which is a pittance compared to what they pay now Yeah, they were forced to drop the whole thing when the u.s. Boycotted the moscow games Stations actually began to defect mostly to ABC and there was a real chance that NBC would go under Silverman was out replaced by brandon tartikoff who turned around the network some of his calls giving hillstree blues a chance the a team giving letterman a late night show Oh And thursday's must-see tv lineup which owned that night for decades taking the network to first place His successor warren littlefield took NBC through the 90s with even more success But by the 2000s things were looking grim again. They had lost multiple sports licenses The 90s hits had finished their runs with only so-so replacements in 2003 general electric who had originally Owned rca in the beginning and had bought it back in the 80s And then but at this point they sold half of it to frances vivendi Who owned universal pictures and renamed it NBC universal? By 2006 NBC was in fourth place barely beating the nascent cw A series of network presidents followed but at 2009 Comcast bought out half of NBC universal from g.e. Who then used the money to buy back vivendi share By 2014 reality shows such as the voice and the super bowl moved NBC back to first place in the all-important 18 to 34 demographic CBS continues to be the most watched network Of course being a tv network is not all it's cracked up to be today One has to wonder which network will be the first to abandon traditional broadcast for the internet While you're wondering about that you can check out our audio podcast How I got my wife to read comics on itunes or on our website sfpodcastnetwork.com From the pop culture bunker i'm ninny and i'm mark thanks for watching