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The
National Broadcasting
Company (NBC) is an
American
television network headquartered in the
GE Building in
New York City's
Rockefeller Center. It is sometimes referred to as the Peacock Network
due to its stylized
peacock logo. The network is now a part of the media company
NBC Universal, a unit of
General Electric (GE) and
Vivendi, and supplies programming to more than 200 affiliated U.S. stations.
Formed in 1926 by
RCA, control of NBC passed to GE in 1986 following GE's
$6.4 billion purchase of RCA. Since this acquisition, the chief executive
of NBC (now NBC Universal) was
Bob Wright, until he retired, giving his job to
Jeff Zucker.
The famous three-note
NBC chimes came about after
several years of development. The three note sequence G-E-C may have
been first heard over
WSB
in
Atlanta which used it for its own purposes until one day someone at
NBC in New York heard the WSB version of the notes during a networked broadcast
of a
Georgia Tech
football game and asked permission to use it on the national network.
NBC started to use the three notes in 1931, and it was the first ever audio
trademark to be accepted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. A variant
sequence was also used that went G-E-C-G, known as "the fourth chime" and
used during wartime (especially in the wake of the
Pearl Harbor bombing), on D-Day, and disasters. The NBC chimes were
mechanized in 1932 by
Richard H. Ranger of the Rangertone company; their purpose was to send
a low level signal of constant amplitude that would be heard by the various
switching stations manned by NBC and AT&T engineers, and thus used as a
system cue for switching different stations between the Red and Blue network
feeds. Contrary to popular legend, the three musical notes, G-E-C, did not
originally stand for NBC's current parent corporation, the
General Electric Company; although General Electric's radio station
in
Schenectady, New York,
WGY,
was an early NBC affiliate. General Electric did not have ownership of NBC
until 1985. G-E-C is still used on NBC-TV and a variant with two notes preceding
them is used on the
MSNBC
cable television network. NBC's radio branch no longer exists.
See also
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National Broadcasting Company |
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| Type |
Broadcast
television network |
| Country |
United States |
| Availability
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National; also distributed in
Canada,
Mexico, and the
Caribbean |
| Founder |
David Sarnoff |
| Owner |
NBC Universal |
| Key people |
Bob Wright,
CEO
Jeff Zucker,
President, NBCU Television Group
Steve Capus,
President,
NBC News
Dick Ebersol,
Chairman,
NBC Sports |
| Launch date |
November 15,
1926 (radio)
July 1,
1941 (television) |
| Past names |
NBC Red Network |
| Website |
www.nbc.com |
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