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Posted on Apr 20, 2014

Paramount Television Network

The Paramount Television Network was a venture in the late 1940s by American film corporation Paramount Pictures to organize a television network. The company had built television stations KTLA in Los Angeles and WBKB in Chicago, and had invested $400,000 in the DuMont Television Network, which operated stations in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. The Paramount Television Network aired several programs, including the Emmy award-winning children's series Time for Beany, and distributed them to an ad-hoc network of stations. It signed affiliation agreements with more than 50 television stations in 1950; despite this, most of Paramount's series were not widely viewed outside the West Coast. The Federal Communications Commission prevented the studio from acquiring additional television stations. Escalating disputes between Paramount and DuMont concerning breaches of contract, company control, and network competition erupted regularly between 1940 and 1956, and led to the dismantling of the DuMont Network. Paramount continued to produce series for other networks, and re-entered the broadcast network field in 1995 with the. A television network is a telecommunications network for distribution of television program content, whereby a central operation provides programming to many television stations or pay TV providers. Until the mid-1980s, television programming in most countries of the world was dominated by a small number of broadcast networks. Many early television networks (e.g., the BBC, NBC or CBC) evolved from earlier radio networks. In countries where most networks broadcast identical, centrally originated content to all their stations and where most individual TV transmitters therefore operate only as large "repeater stations", the terms "television network", "television channel" (a numeric identifier or radio frequency), and "television station" have become mostly interchangeable in everyday language, with professionals in TV-related occupations continuing to make a difference between them. Within the industry, a tiering is sometimes created among groups of networks based on whether their programming is simultaneously originated from a central point, and whether the network master control has the technical and administrative capability to take-over the programming of their affiliates in real-time when it deems this necessary – the most common example being national breaking news events. In North America in particular, many television networks available via cable and satellite television are branded as "channels" because they are somewhat different than traditional networks in the sense defined above, as they are singular operations – they have no affiliates or component stations, but instead are distributed to the public via cable or direct-broadcast satellite companies. Such networks are commonly referred to by terms such as "specialty channels" in Canada or "cable networks" in the U.S. A network may or may not produce all of its own programming. If not, production houses such as Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures can distribute their content to the different networks, and it is common that a certain production house may have programs on two or more rival networks. Similarly, some networks may import television programs from other countries, or use archival programming to help complement their schedules. Some stations have the capability to interrupt the network through the local insertion of TV commercials, station IDs, and emergency alerts. Others completely break away from the network for their own programming, known as regional variation. This is common where small networks are members of larger networks. The majority of commercial television stations are self-owned, even though a variety of these instances are the property of an Owned And Operated television network. The commercial television stations can also be linked with a non-commercial educational broadcasting agency. It is also important to note that some countries have installed nationwide television networks, so that individual television stations can act as common repeaters of nationwide programs. On the other hand, televisions networks also undergo the impending experience of major changes related to cultural varieties. The emergence of cable television network has made available in major media markets on television, programs aimed at American bi-cultural Latinos. Such a diverse captive audience presents an occasion for the networks and affiliates to advertise the best programming that needs to be aired. This is explained by author Tim P. Vos in his abstract "A Cultural Explanation of Early Broadcast" where he determines Targeted group/non-targeted group representations and also the cultural specificity employed in the television network entity. He notes: Policymakers did not expressly intend to create a broadcast order dominated by commercial networks. In fact, legislative attempts were made to limit the network's preferred position. As to individual stations, modern network operations centers usually use broadcast automation to handle most tasks. These systems are not only used for Broadcast programming and for video server playout, but use exact atomic time from GPS or other sources to maintain perfect synchronization with upstream and downstream systems, so that programming appears seamless to audience viewers.