Television in the United States

[12] As in other countries, television stations require a license to broadcast legally (which any prospective broadcaster can apply for through the FCC) and must comply with certain requirements (such as those involving programming of public affairs and educational interest, and regulations prohibiting the airing of indecent content) to retain it; the FCC's Board of Commissioners maintains oversight of the renewal of existing station licenses approaching their expiration, with individuals or groups who wish to oppose the granting of a renewal to a licensee based on any disagreement over rule compliance or any other issues inclined to contest it for consideration of revocation.

This is partly in reaction to the infamous 1968 "Heidi Bowl" telecast in which NBC interrupted a National Football League (NFL) game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders to air a made-for-television film in its scheduled time slot due to a failure in communications between network executives.)

[17] Viewership tends to then decline throughout the week, culminating in the lowest ratings being registered on Friday and Saturday night; most broadcast networks abandoned the programming of first-run scripted fare on Saturdays by 2004, in favor of sports, newsmagazines and burn-offs and reruns of other prime time series; however first-run scripted programming continues to air on Fridays, being mixed in with newsmagazines and/or reality series, depending on the network.

In August 1998, Paxson Communications (later Ion Media prior to being bought by Scripps in 2021) launched Pax TV to counterprogram the four larger networks as well as The WB and UPN, with a focus on family-oriented original and acquired programming; due to underperforming viewership in its initial format, Pax relaunched as i: Independent Television (focusing more on reruns and movies aimed at a broader audience) in July 2005 and then as Ion Television in September 2007.

However, for the most part, very few of these networks have been able to gain a national reach on parity with many of the conventional commercial and non-commercial networks, in part due to the fact that many stations transmit high definition programming on their main feed in 1080i, which requires a bitrate less compartmentalized for allowing more than one multicast feed (which are generally transmitted in standard definition) without risking diminished picture quality; some alternately transmit their main feed in 720p, which favors multiplexing of more than two subchannels at a time (ATSC 3.0, which began development around the time of the 2009 transition with FCC consideration to replace the current ATSC 1.0 as the technological standard for digital television expected to occur in 2016, uses improved compression technology able to fit additional subchannels on a single programming stream as well as allowing for the transmission of high definition content in the 4K resolution format).

[35][36] Demographically focused networks were created during the 2010s; Bounce TV was launched in September 2011 by Martin Luther King III and Andrew Young, featuring a broader general entertainment format aimed at African American adults.

The federal government, through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), does operate NASA TV (a service focusing on the U.S. space program with some educational programming) for public consumption, but only distributes that service via satellite and the Internet and not through terrestrial outlets; the United States Department of Defense produced the Pentagon Channel (later renamed DoD News Channel), a military news outlet that operated from 2004 to 2015.

The income received from the government is insufficient to cover expenses and stations rely on corporate sponsorships and viewer contributions (including from private benefactors) to finance their operations and programming production.

(The practice has since been restricted by the FCC, although six stations that achieved superstation coverage prior to the ban [including WPCH] maintain grandfather clauses to continue offering their programming throughout the United States and Canada.)

(This did not happen without protest, such as an incident in which a Florida satellite dealer intercepted the signal of HBO during a film telecast in 1986 to transmit a text-based message over color bars objecting to the network's decision to encrypt its feed.)

Web television providers in the U.S. include Netflix (which was originally structured as a mail-order DVD rental service), Hulu, MyTV, and many international websites such as YouTube, Myspace, Newgrounds, and Crackle.

In 2015, Dish Network and Sony respectively launched Sling TV and PlayStation Vue, cable-style online and mobile streaming services priced at lower monthly rates than packages offered by traditional pay television system operators.

Conventional broadcast and cable networks also launched OTT services during 2014 and 2015 to primarily reach cord-cutters – most of which are younger adults, particularly around college age, and to combat online copyright infringement of their programming.

A few game shows do not fit neatly into any of these descriptions; one such example is Supermarket Sweep, a grocery-shopping contest that became a cult hit on cable television in the 1990s under host David Ruprecht.

The most prominent as well as the longest-running sketch comedy program is Saturday Night Live, a late-night series which debuted on NBC in November 1975, and has spawned the careers of many popular comedic actors (such as Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy, Dennis Miller and Will Ferrell).

Popular shows such as The Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-Head, Family Guy, South Park, Futurama, American Dad, Rick and Morty, Bob's Burgers, Robot Chicken, King of the Hill, Daria, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Duncanville, and more have came out during this time period.

Dramedy, a term for a television series that mixes elements of comedy and drama, have seen its popularity grown among viewers, thanks to programs like M*A*S*H, Ally McBeal, Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, Psych, Glee, Devious Maids, Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Star Trek pioneered adult-oriented science fiction during its three-year run in the late 1960s and spawned seven spin-off series–two in syndication (The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine), three on network television (The Animated Series, Voyager and Enterprise) and two exclusively streamed on the Internet (Discovery and Picard).

The boom eventually collapsed by the turn of the millennium, and McMahon purchased WCW in 2001 and an upstart hardcore promotion, Paul Heyman's Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), and merged them into WWF to form the modern WWE.

In the latter year, the Supreme Court struck down the NCAA's collective television contract as a violation of antitrust law, deregulating the sale of college sports telecasts and allowing individual teams and athletic conferences to negotiate their own deals with broadcast and cable networks.

), which typically air on its member stations on weekend evenings (although their scheduling is at the discretion of the station as these programs are primarily syndicated on behalf of outside distributors); PBS was also responsible for bringing the hit period drama Downton Abbey to the U.S. and for initially popularizing the long-running science-fiction series Doctor Who in the country (the latter show now airs first-run episodes on BBC America, an outlet launched in 1998 that was specifically designed to bring BBC programming direct to the United States, although through channel drift it now mainly carries American programming; Doctor Who continues to be syndicated to public television stations and, in reruns, is also syndicated to commercial digital multicast networks such as the Retro Television Network).

More recently Japanese live-action series started to be shown in the country by Netflix, examples include Atelier, Hibana: Spark, Samurai Gourmet and Alice in Borderland.

Digital broadcast networks specializing in classic television programming that have become popular since the early 2010s have also served as short-term or long-term homes for many older series that have not been syndicated in decades or have ever been aired in reruns.

However, as companies like Sinclair and the Nexstar Media Group have used outsourcing as loopholes around ownership regulations at the expense of independent (and particularly, minority) ownership, the FCC has made attempts to restrict broadcasters from using them, passing a rule in April 2014 that disallowed all JSAs in which one company sells 15% of advertising for another station and required all existing ones to be unwound within five years (the National Association of Broadcasters backed a provision passed as part of a November 2015 Congressional budget bill that extended to the time limit to unwind existing JSAs to ten years).

Some networks (such as Playboy TV) are devoted exclusively to "adult" content, specifically pornographic material, and therefore viewers may find scenes of simulated or graphic sexual intercourse and nudity on such channels.

Because the United States had relatively weak copyright terms until 1976, a large body of older television series have lapsed into the public domain and are thus free to redistribute in any form.

The big band remote, for the most part, did not survive (a victim of the concurrent start of the rock era), with two exceptions: The Lawrence Welk Show, a big band-driven musical variety show, ran from 1951 until Welk's retirement in 1982 and in reruns from then onward (which eventually moved from commercial to public television syndication), and Guy Lombardo's annual New Year's Eve big-band remotes ran until 1979, two years after Lombardo's death.

"[83] Though Minow's attempts to exhort the networks into producing better programming failed to make a major impact,[84][85] his advocacy for UHF (to expand viewer choices) and non-commercial educational television had a much longer legacy.

As the number of outlets for potential new television channels increased, this also introduced the threat of audience fracturing, in that it would become more difficult to attain a critical mass of viewers in this highly competitive market.

As ratings declined on daytime over-the-air network broadcast television, game shows and soap operas that were the staples of the 1970s and 1980s began to disappear going into the 21st century, with both genres becoming near-obsolete by 2020.