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United States

Television in the United States had long been dominated by the Big Three television networks, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), CBS (formerly the Columbia Broadcasting System) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC); however, the Fox Broadcasting Company (Fox), which launched in October 1986, has gained prominence and is now considered part of the "Big Four". The Big Three provide a significant number of programs to each of their affiliates, including newscasts, prime time, daytime and sports programming, but still reserve periods during each day where their affiliate can air local programming, such as local news or syndicated programs. Since the creation of Fox, the number of American television networks has increased, though the amount of programming they provide is often much less: for example, The CW only provides fifteen hours of primetime programming each week (along with three hours on Saturdays), while MyNetworkTV only provides ten hours of primetime programming each week, leaving their affiliates to fill time periods where network programs are not broadcast with a large amount of syndicated programming. Other networks are dedicated to specialized programming, such as religious content or programs presented in languages other than English, particularly Spanish.

The largest television network in the United States, however, is the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a non-profit, publicly owned, non-commercial educational service. In comparison to the commercial television networks, there is no central unified arm of broadcast programming, meaning that each PBS member station has a significant amount of freedom to schedule television shows as they consent to. Some public television outlets, such as PBS, carry separate digital subchannel networks through their member stations (for example, Georgia Public Broadcasting; in fact, some programs airing on PBS were branded on other channels as coming from GPB Kids and PBS World).

This works as each network sends its signal to many local affiliated television stations across the country. These local stations then carry the "network feed", which can be viewed by millions of households across the country. In such cases, the signal is sent to as many as 200+ stations or as little as just a dozen or fewer stations, depending on the size of the network.

With the adoption of digital television, television networks have also been created specifically for distribution on the digital subchannels of television stations (including networks focusing on classic television series and films operated by companies like Weigel Broadcasting (owners of Movies! and Me-TV) and Nexstar Media Group (owners of Rewind TV and Antenna TV), along with networks focusing on music, sports and other niche programming).

Cable and satellite providers pay the networks a certain rate per subscriber (the highest charge being for ESPN, in which cable and satellite providers pay a rate of more than $5.00 per subscriber to ESPN). The providers also handle the sale of advertising inserted at the local level during national programming, in which case the broadcaster and the cable/satellite provider may share revenue. Networks that maintain a home shopping or infomercial format may instead pay the station or cable/satellite provider, in a brokered carriage deal. This is especially common with low-power television stations, and in recent years, even more so for stations that used this revenue stream to finance their conversion to digital broadcasts, which in turn provides them with several additional channels to transmit different programming sources.