American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) is an American television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948. As one of the Big Three television networks, its programming has contributed to American popular culture.

Creating ABC

From the organization of the first true radio networks in the late 1920s, broadcasting in the United States was dominated by two companies, CBS and RCA's NBC. Before NBC's 1926 formation, RCA had acquired AT&T's New York City station WEAF (later WNBC, now CBS-owned WFAN). With WEAF came a loosely organized system feeding programming to other stations in the northeastern U.S. RCA, before the acquisition of the WEAF group in mid-1926, had previously owned a second such group, with WJZ in New York as the lead station (purchased by RCA in 1923 from Westinghouse)

NAME	American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
TYPE	Radio Network , Television Network
BRAND	America's Broadcasting Company
COUNTRY	United States
LAUNCH  DATE	October 12, 1943 (Radio) , April 19, 1948 (Television)
KEY PEOPLE	Edward Noble ,Robert Iger , Anne Sweeney, David Westin, Paul Lee, George Bodenheim
FORMER NAME	NBC Blue Network
OFFICIAL  WEBSITE	http://abc.go.com

In mid-1944, Noble renamed his network American Broadcasting Company. This set off a flurry of re-naming; to avoid confusion, CBS changed the call-letters of its New York flagship, WABC-AM 880, to WCBS-AM in 1946. In 1953, WJZ in New York and its sister television station took on the abandoned call-letters WABC and WABC-TV. Westinghouse reclaimed the WJZ callsign when it acquired a Baltimore television station in 1959.

1965–1969: Success

Wide World of Sports debuted April 29, 1961 and was the creation of Edgar J. Scherick through his company, Sports Programs, Inc. After selling his company to the American Broadcasting Company, Scherick hired a young Roone Arledge to produce the show. Arledge would eventually go on to become the executive producer of ABC Sports (as well as president of ABC News). Arledge helped ABC's fortunes with innovations in sports programming, such as the multiple cameras used in Monday Night Football. By doing so, he helped to make sports broadcasting into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Despite its relatively small size, ABC found increasing success with television programming aimed at the emerging "Baby Boomer" culture. It broadcast American Bandstand and Shindig!, two shows that featured new popular and youth-oriented records of the day.

1996–2003: Disney purchase and network decline

In 1996, The Walt Disney Company acquired Capital Cities/ABC, and renamed the broadcasting group ABC, Inc., although the network continues to also use American Broadcasting Companies, such as on TV productions it owns.

Still one asset that ABC lacked in the early 2000s that most other networks had was popularity in reality television. ABC's briefly lived reality shows Are You Hot? and the first American iteration of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! proved to be an embarrassment for the network. By end of the 2003–2004 television season, ABC slumped to fourth place, becoming the first of the original "Big Three" networks to fall to such a ranking.

1996–2003: Disney purchase and network decline

In 1996, The Walt Disney Company acquired Capital Cities/ABC, and renamed the broadcasting group ABC, Inc., although the network continues to also use American Broadcasting Companies, such as on TV productions it owns.

For the 2001-2002 television season, ABC began airing newer scripted programming in High Definition; in addition, the network also converted all of its existing situation comedies and drama programming to HD, making it the first such American television network to produce its entire slate of scripted programming in that format. CBS became the first television network to produce programming in High Definition a year earlier.

Still one asset that ABC lacked in the early 2000s that most other networks had was popularity in reality television. ABC's briefly lived reality shows Are You Hot? and the first American iteration of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! proved to be an embarrassment for the network. By end of the 2003–2004 television season, ABC slumped to fourth place, becoming the first of the original "Big Three" networks to fall to such a ranking.

2007–present: The writers' strike and loss of steam

The writer's strike of 2007-2008 would put a damper on ABC's schedule that season like other networks, and it would be particularly bad on most of its new pilots, in which a lot of them (Dirty Sexy Money, Pushing Daisies, and Samantha Who? among others) wouldn't live to see a third season after the 2008-2009 season.

The writer's strike continued to affect the network in the 2008-2009 season (in a lesser extent though) as more series such as Boston Legal, Kyle XY, and the U.S. version of Life on Mars suffered from low viewership, despite the first two being once highlighted-breakout shows on the network.

The sale of ABC Radio

In March 2007 the Federal Communications Commission approved the transfer of ABC's 24 radio station licenses to Citadel; the $2.6 billion merger closed on June 12, 2007. ABC News – a unit of the ABC Television Network – continues to produce ABC News Radio, which Citadel has agreed to distribute for at least ten years.