American Broadcasting Company

The **American Broadcasting Company** (**ABC**) is an American multinational commercial broadcast television network that serves as the flagship property of Walt Disney Television, a division of Disney General Entertainment Content of The Walt Disney Company. The network is headquartered in Burbank, California, on Riverside Drive, directly across the street from Walt Disney Studios and adjacent to the Roy E. Disney Animation Building. The network's secondary offices, and headquarters of its news division, are in New York City, at its broadcast center at 77 West 66th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Since 2007, when ABC Radio (also known as Cumulus Media Networks) was sold to Citadel Broadcasting, ABC has reduced its broadcasting operations almost exclusively to television. It is the fifth-oldest major broadcasting network in the world and the youngest of the American Big Three television networks. ABC is nicknamed "**The Alphabet Network**", as its initialism also represents the first three letters of the English alphabet, in order.

ABC launched as a radio network in 1943, as the successor to the NBC Blue Network, which had been purchased by Edward J. Noble. It extended its operations to television in 1948, following in the footsteps of established broadcast networks CBS and NBC, and well as the lesser known DuMont. In the mid-1950s, ABC merged with United Paramount Theatres (UPT), a chain of movie theaters that formerly operated as a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. Leonard Goldenson, who had been the head of UPT, made the new television network profitable by helping develop and greenlighting many successful series. In the 1980s, after purchasing an 80 percent interest in cable sports channel ESPN, the network's corporate parent, American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., merged with Capital Cities Communications, owner of several print publications, and television and radio stations. Most of Capital Cities/ABC's assets were purchased by Disney in 1995.

ABC has eight owned-and-operated and more than 230 affiliated television stations throughout the United States and its territories. Some ABC-affiliated stations can also be seen in Canada via pay-television providers, and certain other affiliates can also be received over-the-air in areas near the Canada–United States border. ABC News provides news and features content for select radio stations owned by Cumulus Media, as these stations are former ABC Radio properties.

## History

Main article: History of the American Broadcasting Company

The network's history dates to 1927, when it was created as an NBC-operated radio network called the NBC Blue Network. It would later become an independent radio (and, eventually, television) network known as the American Broadcasting Company in 1943. The network was eventually purchased by The Walt Disney Company in the 1990s.

## Programming

Main articles: List of programs broadcast by American Broadcasting Company, ABC News, and ESPN on ABC

The ABC television network provides 89 hours of regularly scheduled network programming each week. It provides 22 hours of prime-time programming to affiliated stations from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday (all times Eastern and Pacific Time) and 7:00–11:00 p.m. on Sundays.

Daytime programming is also provided from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific weekdays(Subtract 1 hour for all other time Zones) (with a one-hour break at 12:00 p.m. Eastern/Pacific for stations to air newscasts, locally produced programming or syndicated programs) featuring the talk-lifestyle shows *The View* and *GMA3: What You Need To Know*, and the soap opera *General Hospital*. ABC News programming includes *Good Morning America* from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. weekdays and Saturdays (along with one-hour Sunday editions); nightly editions of *ABC World News Tonight* (whose weekend editions are occasionally subject to abbreviation or preemption due to sports telecasts overrunning into the program's timeslot), the Sunday political talk show *This Week*, early morning news programs *World News Now* and *America This Morning* and the late night newsmagazine *Nightline*. Late-nights feature the weeknight talk show *Jimmy Kimmel Live!*.

The network's three-hour Weekend morning children's programming timeslot is programmed by syndication distributor Litton Entertainment, which produces *Litton's Weekend Adventure* under an arrangement in which the programming block is syndicated exclusively to ABC owned-and-operated and affiliated stations, rather than being leased out directly by the network to Litton.

### Daytime

Main article: ABC Daytime

ABC's daytime schedule currently features the talk show *The View*, news show *GMA3*, and the soap opera *General Hospital*. Originally premiering in 1963, *General Hospital* is ABC's longest-running entertainment program.

In addition to the long-running *All My Children* (1970–2011) and *One Life to Live* (1968–2012), notable past soap operas seen on the daytime lineup include *Ryan's Hope*, *Dark Shadows*, *Loving*, *The City* and *Port Charles*. ABC also aired the last nine years of the Procter & Gamble-produced soap *The Edge of Night*, following its cancellation by CBS in 1975. ABC Daytime has also aired a number of game shows, including *The Dating Game*, *The Newlywed Game*, *Let's Make a Deal*, *Password*, *Split Second*, *The $10,000/$20,000 Pyramid*, *Family Feud*, *The Better Sex*, *Trivia Trap*, *All-Star Blitz* and *Hot Streak*.

### Sports

Main articles: ESPN on ABC and History of ESPN on ABC

Sports programming is provided on occasion, primarily on weekend afternoons. Since 2006, the ABC Sports division has been defunct, with all sports telecasts on ABC being produced in association with sister cable network ESPN under the branding ESPN on ABC. While ABC has, in the past, aired notable sporting events such as the NFL's *Monday Night Football*, and various college football bowl games, general industry trends and changes in rights have prompted reductions in sports on broadcast television, with Disney preferring to schedule the majority of its sports rights on the networks of ESPN. This changed in 2020 with occasional simulcasts of ESPN *Monday Night Football* broadcasts on ABC.

ABC is the broadcast television rightsholder of the National Basketball Association (NBA), with its package (under the *NBA on ESPN* branding) traditionally beginning with its Christmas Day games, followed by a series of Saturday night and Sunday afternoon games through the remainder of the season, weekend playoff games, and all games of the NBA Finals. During college football season, ABC typically carries an afternoon doubleheader on Saturdays, along with the primetime *Saturday Night Football*. ABC also airs coverage of selected bowl games. Beginning in the 2015 NFL season, ESPN agreed to begin simulcasting a wild card playoff game on ABC.

The Saturday afternoon lineup outside of football season typically features airings of ESPN Films documentaries and other studio programs under the banner *ESPN Sports Saturday*, while Sunday afternoons usually feature either brokered programming, or encore and burn-off airings of ABC programs.

In 2015, ESPN's annual ESPY Awards presentation moved to ABC from ESPN. Bolstered by Caitlyn Jenner accepting the inaugural Arthur Ashe Courage Award during the ceremony, the 2015 ESPY Awards' viewership was roughly tripled over the 2014 ceremony on ESPN.

After the NFL signed a new contract with The Walt Disney Company, ABC will air Super Bowl LXI in 2027. The network has not aired a Super Bowl since 2006.

### Specials

ABC currently holds the broadcast rights to the Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, American Music Awards, and the Country Music Association Awards. ABC has also aired the Miss America competition from 1954 to 1956, 1997 to 2005, and 2011 to 2018.

From 2000 to 2019, ABC held the television rights to most of the *Peanuts* television specials, having acquired the broadcast rights from CBS, which originated the specials in 1965 with the debut of *A Charlie Brown Christmas* (other *Peanuts* specials broadcast annually by ABC, in addition to *A Charlie Brown Christmas*, include *It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown* and *A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving*). Since 2020, all of the *Peanuts* TV specials were acquired by Apple TV+ while some of the specials were later moved to PBS under a sub-licensing agreement with Apple. ABC also broadcasts the annual *Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade* special on Christmas morning.

Since 1974, ABC has generally aired *Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve* – a New Year's Eve special featuring music performances and coverage of festivities in New York's Times Square. ABC is also among the broadcasters of the Tournament of Roses Parade (although as mentioned, the Rose Bowl Game now airs exclusively on ESPN as a College Football Playoff "New Year's Six" bowl).

### Programming library

ABC owns nearly all of its in-house television and theatrical productions made from the 1970s onward, with the exception of certain co-productions (for example, *The Commish* is now owned by the estate of its producer, Stephen Cannell). Worldwide video rights are currently owned by various companies; for example, Kino Lorber owns the North American home video rights to the ABC feature film library (along with some lesser known live action films from Disney's library, mostly from Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures and 20th Century Studios).

When the FCC imposed its Financial Interest and Syndication Rules rules in 1970, ABC proactively created two companies: Worldvision Enterprises as a syndication distributor, and ABC Circle Films as a production company. However, between the publication and implementation of these regulations, the separation of the network's catalog was made in 1973. The broadcast rights to pre-1973 productions were transferred to Worldvision, which became independent in the same year. The company has been sold several times since Paramount Television acquired it in 1999, and has most recently been absorbed into CBS Television Distribution, a unit of Paramount Global. Nonetheless, Worldvision sold portions of its catalog, including the Ruby-Spears and Hanna-Barbera libraries, to Turner Broadcasting System in 1991. With Disney's 1996 purchase of ABC, ABC Circle Films was absorbed into Touchstone Television, a Disney subsidiary which in turn was renamed ABC Studios in 2007.

Also part of the library are most films in the David O. Selznick library, the Cinerama Productions/Palomar theatrical library (with the exception of those films produced in Cinerama which are now under the control of Pacific Theatres and Flicker Alley), the Selmur Productions catalog that the network acquired some years back, and the in-house productions it continues to produce (such as *America's Funniest Home Videos*, *General Hospital*, ABC News productions, and series from Disney Television Studios (ABC Signature and 20th Television). Disney–ABC Domestic Television (formerly known as Buena Vista Television and 20th Television) handles domestic television distribution, while Disney–ABC International Television (formerly known as Buena Vista International Television) handles international television distribution.

## Stations

Main articles: List of ABC television affiliates (by U.S. state), List of ABC television affiliates (table), and ABC Owned Television Stations

Since its inception, ABC has had over 300 television stations that have carried programming from the network at various times throughout its history, including its first two owned-and-operated and affiliated stations, founding O&O WABC-TV and inaugural affiliate WPVI-TV. As of 2020, ABC has eight owned-and-operated stations, and current and pending affiliation agreements with 236 additional television stations encompassing 50 states, the District of Columbia, four U.S. possessions, Bermuda and Saba. This makes ABC the largest U.S. broadcast television network by total number of affiliates. The network has an estimated national reach of 97.72% of all households in the United States (or 305,347,338 Americans with at least one television set).

Currently, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware are the only U.S. states where ABC does not have a locally licensed affiliate (New Jersey is served by New York City O&O WABC-TV in the north half of the state and Philadelphia O&O WPVI-TV in the south; Rhode Island is served by Boston, Massachusetts-licensed WCVB-TV and New Bedford, Massachusetts-licensed WLNE, though outside of the transmitter, all other operations for the station are based in Providence; and Delaware is served by WPVI in the northern third and Salisbury, Maryland, affiliate WMDT in the southern two-thirds of the state). ABC maintains affiliations with low-power stations (broadcasting either in analog or digital) in a few markets, such as Birmingham, Alabama (WBMA-LD), Lima, Ohio (WPNM-LD) and South Bend, Indiana (WBND-LD). In some markets, including the former two mentioned, these stations also maintain digital simulcasts on a subchannel of a co-owned/co-managed full-power television station.

The network has the unusual distinction of having separately owned-and-operated affiliates which serve the same market in Tampa, Florida (WFTS-TV and WWSB), Lincoln, Nebraska (KLKN-TV and KHGI-TV), and Grand Rapids, Michigan (WZZM and WOTV), with an analogous situation arising in Kansas City, Missouri (KMBC-TV and KQTV). KQTV is licensed to St. Joseph, which Nielsen designates as a separate market from Kansas City, despite a mere 55-mile (89 km) distance between the two cities and the Kansas City-based stations (including KMBC) providing better city-grade to Grade B coverage to the area compared to the signals of the primary ABC affiliates in the other aforementioned dual-affiliate markets. (KQTV was St. Joseph's lone major network affiliate until 2011, when locally based News-Press & Gazette Company began establishing low-power affiliates of ABC's four English-language competitors and Telemundo on three low-power stations to end St. Joseph's dependence on Kansas City.) WWSB, KHGI and WOTV, meanwhile, serve areas that do not receive an adequate signal from their market's primary ABC affiliate. (Of note, ABC initially affiliated with WWSB to cover southern portions of the Tampa–St. Petersburg market—including WWSB's city of license, Sarasota—as the transmitters of WTSP, the market's former primary ABC affiliate from 1965 to 1994, and Miami affiliate WPLG had been short-spaced to avoid interference between their respective analog-VHF channel 10 signals; WWSB remained an ABC affiliate after its Tampa affiliation moved from WTSP to WFTS in December 1994, even though WFTS's signal reaches Sarasota and some surrounding areas.)[*relevant?*][*citation needed*]

The Sinclair Broadcast Group is the largest operator of ABC stations by numerical total, owning or providing services to 28 full, primary ABC affiliates and two subchannel-only affiliates. Sinclair owns the largest ABC subchannel affiliate by market size, WABM-DT2/WDBB-DT2 in the Birmingham market, which serve as repeaters of WBMA-LD (which itself is also simulcast on a subchannel of former WBMA satellite WGWW, owned by Sinclair partner company Howard Stirk Holdings). The E. W. Scripps Company is the largest operator of ABC stations in terms of overall market reach, owning 15 ABC-affiliated stations (including affiliates in larger markets such as Cleveland, Phoenix, Detroit and Denver), and through its ownership of Phoenix affiliate KNXV, Las Vegas affiliate KTNV-TV and Tucson affiliate KGUN-TV, it is the only provider of ABC programming for the majority of Arizona (outside the Yuma-El Centro market) and Southern Nevada. Scripps also owns and operates several ABC stations in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, including in Denver, San Diego, Bakersfield, California, and Boise, Idaho, and when combined with the ABC-owned stations in Los Angeles, Fresno, and San Francisco, the affiliations from the News-Press & Gazette Company in Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, Yuma-El Centro, and Colorado Springs-Pueblo, and Sinclair's affiliations in Seattle and Portland, Oregon, these four entities control the access of ABC network programming in most of the Western United States, particularly in terms of audience reach.

## Facilities and studios

All of ABC's owned-and-operated stations and affiliates have had their own facilities and studios, but transverse entities have been created to produce national programming. As a result, television series were produced by ABC Circle Films beginning in 1962 and by Touchstone Television beginning in 1985, before Touchstone was reorganized as ABC Studios in February 2007 and later renamed to its current name ABC Signature in August 2020. Since the 1950s, ABC has had two main production facilities: the ABC Television Center (now The Prospect Studios) on Prospect Avenue in Hollywood, California, shared with the operations of KABC-TV until 1999; and the ABC Television Center, East, a set of studios located throughout New York City.

In addition to the headquarters building on Riverside Drive, other ABC facilities in Burbank include a building at 3800 West Alameda, known as 'Burbank Center', which is primarily associated with Walt Disney Television and functions as the headquarters and broadcast center for Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Freeform, FX, National Geographic, and Radio Disney. Additionally, Disney Television Animation has a facility on Empire Avenue near the Hollywood Burbank Airport. In nearby Glendale, Disney/ABC also maintains the Grand Central Creative Campus, which houses other company subsidiaries, including the studios of KABC-TV and the Los Angeles bureau of ABC News.

ABC owns several facilities in New York grouped mainly on West 66th Street, with the main set of facilities on the corner of Columbus Avenue. In total, ABC's facilities occupy a combined 9,755 square meters (105,000 sq ft) of the 14,864 square meters (159,990 sq ft) of the blocks they encompass. This main set of buildings includes:

* 77 West 66th Street, a 22-story building built in 1988 on a 175-by-200-foot (53 m × 61 m) plot;
* A pair of buildings at 147–155 Columbus Avenue (ten and seven stories) connected by glass bays, constructed on a 150-by-200-foot (46 m × 61 m) plot;
* 30 West 67th Street, a 15-story building with a facade on 67th Street on a 100-by-100-foot (30 m × 30 m) plot;
* 55 West 67th Street, the former First Battery of the New York National Guard, a five-story building on a 174-by-100-foot (53 m × 30 m) plot.

ABC also owns 7, 17 and 47 West 66th Street, three buildings on a 375-by-100-foot (114 m × 30 m) plot.

Disney formerly leased 70,000 sq ft (6,500 m2) at 157 Columbus Avenue, on the other side of 67th Street.