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A sustaining program is a radio or television program that, despite airing on a commercial broadcast station, does not have commercial sponsorship or advertising. This term, mostly used in the United States, was common in the early days of radio, but has become unfamiliar owing to the nearly universal use of commercial advertising on radio and television.
Commercial radio stations began broadcasting in the early 1920s, but it would be over a decade before the concept of selling over-the-air advertising would catch on. Many radio stations were established by radio equipment manufacturers and retailers such as RCA and programming was provided to sell the still-patented radio transmitters and receivers (thus effectively establishing a one-time fee model). Programming was financed from the sale of the equipment. Other radio stations and programs were provided as a public service through endowments or municipal financing; a few were operated by universities or public institutions for educational purposes. Some early radio stations were owned and operated by newspaper publishers. Radio gave an added forum to express the opinions of the owners and resulted in increased newspaper sales.
In effect, most early radio stations had only one sponsor: the company that owned the station. Before long, these companies began to provide their programs to independently owned radio stations, creating the first radio networks.
The radio station owners soon realized they could earn more money by selling sponsorship rights to other businesses, especially as the patents expired and most people already owned a radio. By the 1930s, it was common practice for programs to be owned and produced by the advertiser, who in turn leased production facilities and air time from the network. The advertiser frequently got top billing over the star, as in The Pepsodent Show starring Bob Hope or The Chase and Sanborn Hour starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. If a sponsor dropped an otherwise popular show, the network might choose to continue producing the show itself while it sought a new producer/sponsor, and in the meantime sell individual commercial slots in the show to any sponsors interested. When this happened, the network was "sustaining" the show until a new permanent sponsor took over production.
In the early days of radio broadcasting, sustaining programming included a wide variety of shows offered by radio stations and networks to attract audiences to the new medium. New programs would often go on the air on a sustaining basis in the hopes of attracting a sponsor. If a radio station and its shows became popular, then it was more likely to attract sponsors.
The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, performed Halloween of 1938, was a sustaining program. This allowed the first two-thirds of its sixty minutes to run as simulated 'newscasts' without commercial interruption.
In the early 1950s, the DuMont Television Network began the modern trend of selling advertising time to multiple sponsors. DuMont had trouble finding sponsors for many of their programs and compensated by selling smaller blocks of advertising time to several businesses. The single-sponsor format began to crumble because of the quiz show scandal of 1958, while the recession which dragged through 1957-58 left it in terminal decline.
Currently, most sustaining programming on commercial television is confined to public affairs, religious, and special television news programs (and even most religious programming is now brokered instead). Sustaining programs can occasionally appear in modern times, most commonly if a program loses advertisers (such as through boycott campaigns) but contractual obligations require the program to air until the contract expires, in which case a show may be moved to a graveyard slot to free up what has become highly valuable advertising space; ad rates for new shows are now based on complicated projections based on the network's other programs, and even the rare airing of a television pilot now almost always comes with network advertising.
Outside of the United States, examples of sustaining programs that have aired on commercial television include ITV Schools (which ran on ITV and Channel 4 from 1957 to 1993) and Telecurso (which ran on TV Globo from 1978 to 2014).
Non-commercial public radio stations are funded by donations and operate without radio advertising. However, many of their programs briefly acknowledge (through carefully worded underwriting spots) funding from commercial sponsors; thus, those that do not have such sponsors can be considered sustaining programs. An estimated 53% to 60% of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television's revenues come from private membership donations and grants, [1] making sustaining programs viable in that sector. Most stations solicit individual donations by methods including fundraising, pledge drives or telethons which can disrupt regularly scheduled programming. Some viewers find this a source of annoyance since normal programming is often replaced with specials aimed at a wider audience to solicit new members and donations, while others find it ironic that these pledge drives air the most desirable programming in order to solicit sponsorship for regularly scheduled shows they have no desire to watch, under the ruse that the donations are supporting the pledge drive programming. [2]
Music radio is a radio format in which music is the main broadcast content. After television replaced old time radio's dramatic content, music formats became dominant in many countries. Radio drama and comedy continue, often on public radio.
A television broadcaster or television network is a telecommunications network for the distribution of television content, where a central operation provides programming to many television stations, pay television providers or, in the United States, multichannel video programming distributors. Until the mid-1980s, broadcast programming on television in most countries of the world was dominated by a small number of terrestrial networks. Many early television networks such as the BBC, CBC, PBS, PTV, NBC or ABC in the US and in Australia evolved from earlier radio networks.
The DuMont Television Network was one of America's pioneer commercial television networks, rivaling NBC and CBS for the distinction of being first overall in the United States. It was owned by Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, a television equipment and television set manufacturer & broadcasting company. DuMont was founded in 1940 and began operation on August 15, 1946.
Radio programming is the process of organising a schedule of radio content for commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting by radio stations.
Christian radio refers to Christian media radio formats that focus on Christian religious broadcasting or various forms of Christian music. Many such formats and programs include contemporary Christian music, gospel music, sermons, radio dramas, as well as news and talk shows covering popular culture, economics, and political topics from a Christian perspective.
Public broadcasting involves radio, television, and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing, and commercial financing, and claim to avoid both political interference and commercial influence.
WPXN-TV is a television station in New York City, serving as the local Ion Television outlet. Owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company, the station maintains offices on Seventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and transmits from atop One World Trade Center.
A non-commercial educational station is a radio station or television station that does not accept on-air advertisements, as defined in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and was originally intended to offer educational programming as part, or whole, of its programming. NCE stations do not pay broadcast license fees for their non-profit uses of the radio spectrum. Stations which are almost always operated as NCE include public broadcasting, community radio, and college radio, as well as many religious broadcasting stations. Nearly all non-commercial radio stations derive their support from listener support, grants and endowments, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that distributes supporting funds provided by Congress to support public radio.
An infomercial is a form of television commercial that resembles regular TV programming yet is intended to promote or sell a product, service or idea. It generally includes a toll-free telephone number or website. Most often used as a form of direct response television (DRTV), they are often program-length commercials, and are typically 28:30 or 58:30 minutes in length. Infomercials are also known as paid programming. This phenomenon started in the United States, where infomercials were typically shown overnight and early morning, outside peak prime time hours for commercial broadcasters. Some television stations chose to air infomercials as an alternative to the former practice of signing off, while other channels air infomercials 24 hours a day. Some stations also choose to air infomercials during the daytime hours, mostly on weekends, to fill in for unscheduled network or syndicated programming. By 2009, most infomercial spending in the U.S. occurred outside of the traditional overnight hours. Stations in most countries around the world have instituted similar media structures. The infomercial industry is worth over $200 billion.
Television is one of the major mass media outlets in the United States. In 2011, 96.7% of households owned television sets; about 114,200,000 American households owned at least one television set each in August 2013. Most households have more than one set. The percentage of households owning at least one television set peaked at 98.4%, in the 1996–1997 season. In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one television; in 1955, 75 percent did. In 1992, 60 percent of all U.S. households had cable television subscriptions. However, this number has fallen to 40% in 2024.
Religious broadcasting, sometimes referred to as faith-based broadcasts, is the dissemination of television and/or radio content that intentionally has religious ideas, religious experience, or religious practice as its core focus. In some countries, religious broadcasting developed primarily within the context of public service provision, whilst in others, it has been driven more by religious organisations themselves. Across Europe and in the US and Canada, religious broadcasting began in the earliest days of radio, usually with the transmission of religious worship, preaching or "talks". Over time, formats evolved to include a broad range of styles and approaches, including radio and television drama, documentary, and chat show formats, as well as more traditional devotional content. Today, many religious organizations record sermons and lectures, and have moved into distributing content on their own web-based IP channels.
A pledge drive is an extended period of fundraising activities, generally used by public broadcasting stations to increase contributions. The term "pledge" originates from the promise that a contributor makes to send in funding at regular intervals for a certain amount of time. During a pledge drive, regular and special programming is followed by on-air appeals for pledges by station employees, who ask the audience to make their contributions, usually by phone or the Internet, during this break.
Radio broadcasting has been used in the United States since the early 1920s to distribute news and entertainment to a national audience. In 1923, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one radio receiver, while a majority did by 1931 and 75 percent did by 1937. It was the first electronic "mass medium" technology, and its introduction, along with the subsequent development of sound films, ended the print monopoly of mass media. During the Golden Age of Radio it had a major cultural and financial impact on the country. However, the rise of television broadcasting in the 1950s relegated radio to a secondary status, as much of its programming and audience shifted to the new "sight joined with sound" service.
The Oklahoma Educational Television Authority (OETA) is a network of PBS member television stations serving the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The authority operates as a statutory corporation that holds the licenses for all of the PBS stations operating in the state; it is managed by an independent board of gubernatorial appointees, and university and education officials, which is linked to the executive branch of the Oklahoma state government through the Secretary of Education.
In the United States, commercial radio stations make most of their revenue by selling airtime to be used for running radio advertisements. These advertisements are the result of a business or a service providing a valuable consideration, usually money, in exchange for the station airing their commercial or mentioning them on air. The most common advertisements are "spot commercials", which normally last for no more than one minute, although extended versions, commonly running for up to 45, 60 or more minutes, are termed "informercials" because they delve deeper into detailed information on and stories about commercial product or service offerings.
KCEB was a television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, which was affiliated with NBC, ABC and the DuMont Television Network. Owned by Elfred Beck, the station operated for almost ten months from March 13 to December 10, 1954.
The early history of television in the United States, particularly between 1956 and 1986, was dominated by the Big Three television networks: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The term fourth television network was used within the industry during this era to refer to a theoretical fourth commercial broadcast (over-the-air) television network that would operate as a direct competitor to the "Big Three".
In television broadcasting, the network era, also known as the Silver Age of television, refers to the period in American television history from the end of the first Golden Age of Television in the late 1950s to the beginning of the multi-channel transition in the mid-1980s. During this era, the Big Three television networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—dominated American television. This determination is established by institutional aspects that regularized television for the majority of the country, including color television, made standard by the late 1960s. As the arrival of new technologies emerged, it offered television viewers more choice and control. This eventually ended the network era and forced viewers to move into the multi-channel transition, leading to the post-network era and second Golden Age of Television.
Radio was introduced in Canada in the late 1890s, although initially transmissions were limited to the dot-and-dashes of Morse code, and primarily used for point-to-point services, especially for maritime communication. The history of broadcasting in Canada dates to the early 1920s, as part of the worldwide development of radio stations sending information and entertainment programming to the general public. Television was introduced in the 1950s, and soon became the primary broadcasting service.
In the United States, other than a few direct services, public broadcasting is almost entirely decentralized and is not operated by the government, but does receive some government support.