what defines a tv network

December 12, 2006 2:20 PM

What is a TV "Network"?

I thought NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX qualify as networks, because they are networks of local stations that are all part of a "family," like Fox 5 or NBC 4.

But last week, TNT aired "Lord of the Rings" and called it the "Network Premiere." How is TNT, which doesn't have local stations, a network?

I realize that TNT is part of the Turner Network, which also owns CNN and other stations (and I think the N in TNT stands for Network), but by that logic, HBO is a network too, because they own HBO Latino and many other HBOs. So since HBO has already shown "Lord of the Rings," didn't HBO (or Cinemax or whatever) have the real network premiere?

Has "Network" just become a buzzword for a station that's part of your basic cable lineup, as opposed to a station like HBO, that's an additional subscription?

Also, what's the big deal? TNT -- and other stations -- bill "The Network Premiere" as if it's a special event. But so what? Is there anyone who says, "I wasn't all that sure I wanted to watch that movie, but it's the Network PREMIERE! I've GOT to see THAT!"?

posted by grumblebee to media & arts (23 comments total)

Also, what's the big deal? TNT -- and other stations -- bill "The Network Premiere" as if it's a special event. But so what? Is there anyone who says, "I wasn't all that sure I wanted to watch that movie, but it's the Network PREMIERE! I've GOT to see THAT!"?

Aw, grumblebee, I know you're more than old enough to remember when the network premiere was the first time we normal slobs could see movies missed in the theater. Yes, they're really still using the language from the olden days, before you could rent movies. Some marketing study probably shows that the words still subconsciously resonate with a certain segment of the population.
posted by desuetude at 2:28 PM on December 12, 2006

I didn't see that specific commercial, but I remember other commercials for movies on TNT specifying, "Tonight, the TNT Network Television Premiere of . . .," which to me always meant "tonight is the first time this movie will be shown on the TNT network."

But yes, it's a cheap marketing ploy designed to make you feel a sense of urgency about tuning in. And no, you don't really need to buy the Ab Lounge in the next 60 seconds to get the price reduced by one full payment. They'll give you the discount if you call them in 90 seconds, I promise.
posted by decathecting at 2:33 PM on December 12, 2006

TNT is a network because it stands for Turner Network Television. Duh.

The only sense that this can be a network premiere is the fact that it is the first time it premieres on that network. The only way one can draw a distinction between TNT and HBO is that HBO is a premium channel Wikipedia claims that this means it is not classified as a network, but cites no sources.
posted by grouse at 2:34 PM on December 12, 2006

A broadcast network is, as you say, a group of affiliated stations. I think there are/used to be FCC rules somewhere about how affiliated they have to be a "Network" as opposed to just a network but danged if I can find them.

A cable "network" is just a cable station. The term there has no real meaning distinct from station - they use it so fogies like me, well, apparently all of us here so far, think of their programming as top-quality (Channel 2 level vs. Channel 11 level if you grew up in NYC.)
posted by Opposite George at 2:38 PM on December 12, 2006

s/they have/they are/

And no, you don't really need to buy the Ab Lounge in the next 60 seconds to get the price reduced by one full payment. They'll give you the discount if you call them in 90 seconds, I promise.

Oh, the disillusionment!
posted by Opposite George at 2:45 PM on December 12, 2006

A good book to read on this subject is Three Blind Mice, although even that is a bit dated now.

The bottom line is that yes, it's just an old buzzword. The slightly less bottom line is that networks have affiliates and cable channels don't (well, not really).
posted by bingo at 3:05 PM on December 12, 2006

I think TNT is a 'network' because it wants to be a network, which probably stems from the fact that it was established back when being a network still meant something, and Ted Turner wanted to compete with the Big Three.

But the 'network premiere' is a bit of an anachronism now. They'd be better off calling it the 'basic cable premiere,' or 'first time you can see this movie with a bunch of stuff removed to make time for the commercials' but that just doesn't have the same ring to it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:15 PM on December 12, 2006

I realize that TNT is part of the Turner Network, which also owns CNN and other stations (and I think the N in TNT stands for Network), but by that logic, HBO is a network too, because they own HBO Latino and many other HBOs.

I just want to clarify...HBO is not a network, and HBO Latino is not an affiliate.

A network creates (or, often, just acquires) a property and then distributes that property to its affiliates.

A company like HBO creates or acquires a property, and then sends it to your house, via your local cable company. In this scenario, your cable company is the closest thing to an affiliate. HBO Latino is just another stream of data coming to your house.
posted by bingo at 3:17 PM on December 12, 2006

got it, bingo, but is TNT doing something different? They too are just sending their data directly to my house via my cable company. They're not sending it to TNT 11, TNT 38 or TNT 12.
posted by grumblebee at 4:05 PM on December 12, 2006

In the old days, when programs were shipped across the country on high-bandwidth circuits in the phone network, a TV network was all the stations that received programs from a particular studio's feed.

These days, the term's effectively meaningless.
posted by Myself at 4:34 PM on December 12, 2006

Hey Myself,

The high-bandwidth circuits in the phone network you're talking about. Was that the reason the circuits were created, or were they originally for some other purpose?

I had always assumed, incorrectly, that the shows were mailed (or fedex-ed) to the stations.

TIA
posted by sandra_s at 5:33 PM on December 12, 2006

Don't know about the US, but: in the early days in Oz, affiliated stations booked a circuit days/weeks in advance. Telephone techs would patch up the circuit through several exchanges using normal wideband / carrier bearers (usually the backup bearers). Once the booking had expired, it'd be pulled down and the bearers returned to normal service.

Later on, a specialist overlay network was created. Dedicated circuits were used, terminating at and switched through a central TOC (Television Operations Centre) or SOC (Sound Operations Centre). Some connections - say, from head station to affiliate - were "semi-permanent" (switched, but permanently so); others were switched on a per-booking basis.

(Interesting aside: larger rural exchanges had a video/audio patch point housed in a box stuck on the outside wall. If a big event or news story happened in the middle of nowhere, the networks would ring the TOC and arrange a booking, and the cameramen would all queue up and plug in when it was their turn to send their footage back. With the advent of satellite news gathering trucks, these disappeared.)

Later still, with the advent of satellite links, networks would either lease time directly from the operator or sometimes lease a permanent transponder slot and pretty much bounce stuff around themselves.

These days, they generally have dedicated links - "point to point" via satellite, or end-user switched/routed by standard IP / ATM / whatever.

(Oddly, though, radio stations here still lease dedicated point-to-point analogue lines {well, analogue and point-to-point from their POV - they're pretty quickly converted into a standard 2Meg digital stream and switched through the network}. You'd think they'd just lease a raw 2Meg stream themselves, or even use ISDN, but no...)
posted by Pinback at 6:38 PM on December 12, 2006

In the United States in the pre-satellite days, the Phone Company built a coast-to-coast network of coaxial cable to carry network television signals. Microwave relays filled in the gaps, and the shows were recorded on tape in Los Angeles to be refed three hours later. These days it's all done on satellite.

In Canada, in the very early days, network programs were shipped to outlying areas in the form of kinescopes (films), by air or train, until the CBC and the phone companies got together on a microwave network (and eventually, a second circuit was added to that system to carry CTV's programs.) Again, now it's all distributed by satellite.

People use "network" as a generic description for any programming that's seen either regionally or nationally, whether by cable or by a traditional network of stations.
posted by evilcolonel at 7:47 PM on December 12, 2006

People use "network" as a generic description for any programming that's seen either regionally or nationally, whether by cable or by a traditional network of stations.

Doesn't this describe all programming? Except something seen internationally.
posted by grumblebee at 8:01 PM on December 12, 2006

The term "network" was originally a radio concept from the days when individual local affiliate stations received programming via a network of long telephone lines, as described above. This programming would originate in New York -- and later Los Angeles -- and would be fed to stations along this network. This system gave rise to various national broadcasting networks, which ultimately became NBC, ABC, and CBS. This same system was used when TV began to emerge and lasted until satellites become practical to distribute programming.

Before cable and video rental, besides theaters, the only place to see a movie would be on a television broadcast. That usually meant that a network would pruchase the broadcast rights for the movie and then distribute it to affiliates. Hence the idea of a "network premiere".

Now, today's era of cable and satellite, the concept of a "network premiere" is a little less accurate. However, in the case of TNT, it could be argued that since TNT theoretically does have affiliates -- in the sense that your local cable provider could be considered an "affiliate" of TNT, since it locally re-distributes programming in the same sense that a broadcast station re-distributes programming from a network -- then the first time a movie appears on TNT could be a "network premiere".

As others have pointed out, it's probably more of a marketing term than anything else. It wouldn't be as easy to say "Shown for the first time on cable TV, unless you count subscriber channels like HBO and PPV."
posted by marcusb at 8:24 PM on December 12, 2006

Turner Broadcasting has previously owned several broadcast affiliates and still owns at least one, the flagship of the company WTBS 17, in Atlanta.

WTBS broadcasts nearly the same lineup as the TBS cable channel, but carries a 6am Headline News cast instead of The Megan Mullally Show.

HBO is a premium service, you have to pay for it and generally have to pay more for the other HBOs. TNT, TBS, etc could be considered a network because they do have over-the-air broadcasting facilities they produce for, but I think they're using "network" to mean "basic cable" here.
posted by aristan at 8:37 PM on December 12, 2006

TNT, TBS, etc could be considered a network because they do have over-the-air broadcasting facilities

TBS does, but I don't think TNT does in the conventional sense.
posted by grouse at 12:03 AM on December 13, 2006

I was a television engineer working for the Nashville, TN ABC affiliate of ABC (a General Electric Broadcasting station at the time) in 1974. We had 2 "nailed up" wideband circuits at that time, over which we recieved programs and commercials from the ABC network, with some redundancy. Each circuit cost us something like $90,000 a month in 1974, but that was one of the base costs of being a network affiliate. We also had little say about programming or commercial content during the 7 to 11 p.m. evening block in our Central Time Zone, and were generally prohibited from pre-empting the network with local programming during these hours. This last policy was economically disastrous to our attempts to grow our revenue base, as we could neither sell or air locally generated commercials or programming during most of our evening prime time hours, due to network affiliation restraints. We were therefore forced to build revenues in third party video production, and wound up leasing out most of our studio time and expertise to various Country Music projects, and the wealthiest churches in Nashville, who wanted to produce early Christian programming for cable and direct broadcast.

Over time, network affiliation has meant less and less to local stations, as a result of declining average viewership for network programming, and so local stations have been able to diverge from the lockstep network model. More and more, remaining broadcast affilates have important commercial slots they can produce and sell directly in the prime time blocks, and this once sacrosanct
network economic territory is under continual assault with each passing programming season. In Jacksonville, FL, a local station which once a CBS network affiliate dropped the CBS network in 2002, because the costs of belonging to the network exceeded what management felt were the values accruing from such an affiliation. It continues to operate successfully as an independent station 4 years later, having adjusted it's news staff and overhead to the reality of market economics.

In general, in this market, network affiliations over the last 5 years have been very fluid, and the benefits, if any, of network affiliation, as balanced against the costs, are hard to see. Viewers simply have little loyalty to networks anymore, and increasingly, make no social plans around network programming.
posted by paulsc at 12:16 AM on December 13, 2006

Grouse:

TBS does, but I don't think TNT does in the conventional sense.

Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that TNT & TBS are the sister stations, owned by the same corporate parent.
posted by aristan at 8:50 AM on December 13, 2006

...but is TNT doing something different? They too are just sending their data directly to my house via my cable company.

I don't know how it works exactly, but I think there is an affiliate involved. The advertising you get when you watch TNT can be local advertising, whether you watch it on cable or with bunny ears.
posted by bingo at 9:21 AM on December 13, 2006

Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that TNT & TBS are the sister stations, owned by the same corporate parent.

I think you are grasping at straws here (and to explain marketing pablum, no less). HBO is also owned by the same corporate parent. It makes no sense to say that any of these have over-the-air broadcasting facilities other than TBS, because TBS is the only one that has over-the-air broadcasting facilities.

The advertising you get when you watch TNT can be local advertising, whether you watch it on cable or with bunny ears.

Just like any other cable station that allows local cable providers to add local advertising. There's no "affiliate" other than the cable provider, which is no more an affiliate here than in the case of HBO.
posted by grouse at 10:21 AM on December 13, 2006

People use "network" as a generic description for any programming that's seen either regionally or nationally, whether by cable or by a traditional network of stations.

Doesn't this describe all programming? Except something seen internationally.

What I mean is, if you turn on your local channel, let's say Channel 3, at 5 o'clock, you may see a local newscast, or a rerun of Friends, or Oprah. In these cases, you're not watching a network -- the point of origination is local, whether it's the station's own studio or a playback server or tape machine feeding the transmitter. Now, at a certain time of day, the source switches to the network -- ABC, the CW, etc. -- and that's programming that's fed simultaneously to several stations at once. Or, several stations may pool their resources for a "regional" network to carry college football, etc.

In this respect, a cable "network" meets the criteria because it's being beamed to multiple cities at cnce. But your cable company's local access station would not meet this criteria.
posted by evilcolonel at 1:44 PM on December 13, 2006

Back in 1993, I was watching the Fox network proudly announce the "*world* premiere" of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Except I knew for a fact it had been screened numerous times on TV in the UK (which was still part of the world at the time).

So I'd chalk it up to marketing baloney - and the fact that no-one is bothered enough to call in the FCC or whoever over this.
posted by badlydubbedboy at 4:04 PM on December 13, 2006