Broadcasting in the United States

From the earliest days of radio, broadcasting has had its origins in the United States. In 1906, the first experimental stations were sending music over the radio waves to ships at sea. In 1912, the United States started to license experimental broadcast stations.

Unlike many other countries, broadcasting within the U.S. has been operated exclusively by private organizations. There is no equivalent to the BBC in the United States. The Public Broadcasting System and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting do provide some programming, but they provide it on a contract, purchased basis to educational television (and radio) stations, most of which are owned by local non-profits, universities, individual states or by local school boards in the community.

The rest of all broadcasting is done by private companies who all but have an ownership of the channel they operate on, even though the fiction of holding a hearing for a license renewal is done by the FCC every few years. Each individual station owns its own transmitter site and facilities (there is no central infrastructure like the UK's "Freeview", where multiple broadcasters share the BBC's antenna sites).

Recent changes have increased the number of broadcast stations one entity may own, thus allowing very large companies like Clear Channel Communications (iHeart Radio) or Sinclair Broadcasting to own hundreds of radio or TV stations that reach something like 20% of the entire country. Back when the national networks had considerable more reach, they were each limited to no more than seven owned-and-operated broadcast stations (and no more than five VHF stations). These would usually be in the largest urban markets; the rest of the stations would be "affiliates" which carried the network programming but were owned independently. PBS used a slightly different pattern in which the individual local broadcasters were "member stations" who, collectively, owned the network.

American Television Stations often display a prominent local channel number in their branding, such as the "circle seven" logo on WABC-TV and KABC-TV. This number usually corresponds to whatever frequency the station used before the digital transition; these are virtual channel numbers and that broadcaster with the big red "2" logo may well now be a digital UHF station today. If the same station is using digital compression to send multiple program streams simultaneously, the over-the-air subchannels will have numbers like 2.1, 2.2, 2.3... which appear on no other medium.

In the 1920s, the United States switched to its current pattern of station call signs. The original convention was created for Morse Code shipboard telegraphy; the ships had 'K' callsigns in the Atlantic and 'W' callsigns in the west, while the land stations reversed this pattern. The few remaining three-letter callsigns mostly date to the era of network AM radio broadcasts, although many of the historic calls were carried over to FM and eventually to TV.

Call signs
Call signs are codes that identify a station. The United States is allocated the prefixes AA-AL, K, N and W. For broadcasting, only K and W are used, derived from the Morse code symbols for A and N, with an extra dash. Except for the oldest stations and translators, all broadcast stations are four letters long. Older stations may have three letter callsigns left over from earlier days, such as San Francisco's KGO or Chicago's WGN.

K is used for stations west of the Mississippi River, and W is used for stations east of the Mississippi. Prior to 1923, the dividing line was further west. Because of this rule change, and other more complicated reasons, there are stations that do not follow the K/W convention. KDKA (AM) in Pittsburgh, the oldest commercial station in the United States, KYW Philadelphia and WNAX (AM) in Yankton, South Dakota, are a few notable examples. WWV and WWVH, a time broadcast in Colorado and Hawaii, is another exception. In Minnesota and Louisiana, where the Mississippi River begins and ends, station can have either W or K.

There are also exceptions based upon prior ownership. In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, every television station's call sign starts with a K except for WFAA, because the station was originally owned by the same company that owned WFAA (AM). This practice of allowing call sign carry over continues even today. Stations with a common owner can have the same callsign, but with a different suffix. So there can be a KOPB (AM), a KOPB-FM and a KOPB-DT (for digital television). Other suffixes are "TV" for television and "LP" for low power FM/TV (there's also "CA", "CD", and "LD" for low power TV; for example, WWNY-CD rebroadcasts WWNY-TV into Massena, New York). To reach communities outside of the main transmitter's area or fill in "dead spots", translators are used. The least-powerful translators often have callsigns like K11BX (the number in the middle is the "channel" or frequency assignment where the station operates; the next two or [rarely] three letters are assigned sequentially, followed optionally by a -D for a digital TV station). Numbered translators are invariably low-power stations. The number will also tell you the type of translator: if the number is two digits, it's a repeater of a television station; a three digit number is a repeater of an FM station. Often, religious broadcasters abuse the translator rules and have FM translators scattered across the country; they're also prone to abuse the reservation of 88.1-91.9 MHz (intended for US non-commercial educational stations) by competing with public outlets like NPR for this scarce FM spectrum.

Unlike Canada and México, a full-power rebroadcaster of a commercial station (with no origination capability) is rare in the United States. The few "satellite stations" that exist at full power tend to serve extremely-rural areas (like KNRR in Pembina, North Dakota) which can't support an originating station due to economic hardship... or they're non-commercial broadcasters like PBS (which are able to operate under less restrictive concentration-of-ownership rules).

As most small-town stations are not owned by the network, stations are commonly identified by their callsigns, which can be a big part of the station's branding.

Bands
There are five main broadcast bands in the United States:
 * Amplitude modulation, or AM, radio covers 520 to 1710 kHz. This band is mostly used for news, talk and sports radio (a shift from once-commonplace music formats which began in the late '80s). Its advantages are long range and simple receivers. It has low bandwidth, so most music stations have moved to the FM band. Also known as medium wave.
 * Frequency modulation, or FM, radio covers 87.9 to 107.9 MHz. The last digit after the decimal point is always an odd number. It is used for all kinds of broadcasts, from college radio to top 40 music. HD radio is starting here as a subcarrier, although the receivers are really expensive now. FM is good for stereo music and can support data streams on subcarriers. Part of the VHF band. News, talk and sports radio are making their ways to FM, slowly but surely.
 * VHF TV covers channels 2 to 13. Channel 1 was lost to two-way land mobile radio by 1948. As all full-service stations were forced digital-only by mid-2009, the low VHF channels are now largely vacant.
 * UHF TV covers channels 14 to 36. It's been losing spectrum to mobile telephony for years. Channels 70-83 were lost in 1983, followed by channels 52-69 at the end of the digital transition. A forced "repack" is expected to push the rest of the broadcasters out of the channel 38-51 range by 2021. With channel 37 reserved for radio astronomy, the low-UHF band is getting very crowded.
 * Shortwave radio is mostly unused for broadcasting in the United States. What stations do exist are religious (often run by a new "prophet") or operated by fringe groups. You can find official time signal broadcasts there too, among other signals; really cool alarm and digital clocks can set themselves to these signals. The US government does operate news stations like Voice of America to reach an audience overseas, along with the occasional bit of propaganda aimed at Cuba, communist China or (historically) the former Soviet bloc.

Satellite broadcasting operates on higher frequencies; there are also frequencies outside the main terrestrial broadcast bands for certain special-purpose or utility stations, such as weather or marine forecasts.

Standards and Regulation
The Media Watchdog in the United States is the Federal Communications Commission. Besides being notorious for "broadcast standards and practices", the FCC sets the rules for channels, power, and other technical stuff, as well as licensing stations.

The United States used NTSC for analog television broadcasting and now ATSC for digital television. HD Radio is the digital radio standard, despite the rest of the world using the DAB standard

Networks
There is no national government-operated broadcaster. All stations are funded by advertising, donations or money from Viewers Like You the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Local stations are either owned locally, by media conglomerates or the networks themselves (this is common in large markets such as New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, which are usually the top three Nielsen-ranked markets in that order). Most stations are affiliated with a national network, such as ABC, CBS, NBC or FOX. This means that the station plays shows from the national network, along with local programming. In the very smallest markets (such as Glendive, Montana) a small, privately-owned station may be affiliated with multiple networks.

Public television and radio is partially funded by the government through the CPB, but isn't a government broadcaster, though individual stations may be operated by local governments. PBS is the public television network and NPR is one of the public radio networks.

Comic Books

 * Billy Batson in the original Captain Marvel works for WHIZ. He hosts a couple of panel shows and reads news and continuity.

Film

 * In the 1978 movie FM, the station is referred to as "Q-Sky". This was in the early days of radio stations taking on call letters with Z, X or Q and branding themselves with names like "X93" or "The River."
 * Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward star in a movie about a conservative New Orleans radio station WUSA.

Literature

 * The short story "On a Clear Day You Can See All the Way to Conspiracy" by Desmond Warzel takes place at WCUY, a fictitious AM radio station in Cleveland.

Live-Action TV

 * WKRP in Cincinnati is set in a radio station.
 * Frasier worked in a Seattle radio station called KACL, AM 780.
 * News Radio took place in radio station WNYX.
 * On Hee Haw there was an occasional skit about KORN radio.
 * The old American Movie Classics channel used to have a series called Remember WENN, about a station in the 1930s.

Music

 * Storyteller/Songwriter Harry Chapin tells how he is the morning DJ of the radio station in the song WOLD.

Western Animation

 * KBBL is a radio station in The Simpsons. There is also KBBL-TV.

Film

 * In Network, the fictitious fourth network (alongside CBS, ABC and NBC) is UBS (Universal Broadcasting Service).
 * The 1989 "Weird Al" Yankovic cult classic UHF had two stations whose call letters are never identified, Channel 62 and Channel 8 (the latter of which went dark by the movie's end; the logo for that station looks identical to the logo used by real-life Dallas station WFAA from 1996 to the present day)
 * Bruce Almighty. WKBW-TV 7 (ABC Buffalo) sacks the lead character in the first five minutes. "That is perfect. That is the motivation that I needed! Right there! Thank you. Thank you, W.K.B.W.! Wimpy Kitty Baby Whiners! That's what that stands for! I'll see you on Channel 5 where they do the real news."

Live-Action TV

 * The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Mary Richards worked at WJM 12 in Minneapolis.

Western Animation

 * WQHG is the television station in Family Guy.
 * KBBL-TV's crosstown competitor in The Simpsons is Canal Ocho (channel 8, a Spanish-language broadcaster). There are also occasional self-deprecating cheap shots at FOX – the programme's own home network.