AMERICAN BROADCASTING COMPANY

(ABC) major American television network that is a division of the Walt Disney Company. Its headquarters are in New York City. The company's history traces to 1926, when the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and several other firms founded the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to operate a nationwide radio broadcasting network. NBC expanded so rapidly that by 1928 it found itself with an excess of affiliates in the same cities, so it split its programming into two separate networks called the Red and the Blue networks. After the Federal Communications Commission declared in 1941 that no company could own more than one radio network, NBC sold the Blue Network to Edward J. Noble, the millionaire maker of Life Savers candy, who named it the American Broadcasting System. The following year he changed the company's name to American Broadcasting Company, Inc. (ABC). In 1953 United Paramount Theatres, the movie theatre arm of Paramount Pictures, merged with ABC, which thereby became the owner of several hundred American movie houses (many of which were sold in 1974). The merger provided ABC with the capital it needed to expand its presence in the new medium of television, and it quickly became one of the three major television networks. From the early 1960s the ABC television network was a major broadcaster of sports; instant replay was developed by ABC engineers in 1961. In 1955 ABC entered the phonograph record business with the purchase of a subsidiary and, over the years, under the consolidated ABC Records Division, developed such labels as ABC, Westminster, Dot, and Impulse. In 1979 the record division was sold and a video division was begun. In 1985 ABC Companies was purchased by Capital Cities Communications, Inc. In 199596 Capital Cities/ABC Inc. was acquired by the Walt Disney Company for $19,000,000,000, thereby creating the world's largest media and entertainment company.