Television in the United States facts for kids

Television is one of the major mass media outlets in the United States. As of 2011^[update], household ownership of television sets in the country is 96.7%, with approximately 114,200,000 American households owning at least one television set as of August 2013. The majority of households have more than one set. The peak ownership percentage of households with at least one television set occurred during the 1996–97 season, with 98.4% ownership. In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one television while 75 percent did by 1955, and by 1992, 60 percent of all U.S. households received cable television subscriptions.

As a whole, the television networks that broadcast in the United States are the largest and most distributed in the world, and programs produced specifically for US-based networks are the most widely syndicated internationally. Due to a recent surge in the number and popularity of critically acclaimed television series during the 2000s and the 2010s to date, many critics have said that American television had entered a modern golden age around the beginning of the 21st century; whether that golden age has ended or is ongoing in the early 2020s is disputed.

Major broadcast networks

The four major U.S. broadcast television networks are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), CBS (an abbreviation for the Columbia Broadcasting System, its former legal name), the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and the Fox Broadcasting Company (Fox). The first and elder three (which are colloquially known as the "Big Three") began as radio networks.

Network daytime schedules consist of talk shows and soap operas, although one network – CBS – still carries game shows. ABC, CBS and NBC offer network news programs each evening.

Saturday mornings usually feature network programming aimed at children (traditionally these mainly consisted of animated cartoons and in some cases, live-action scripted series. Sports and infomercials (and on some stations, syndicated feature film packages) can be found on weekend afternoons, followed again by the same type of prime-time shows aired during the week.

See also

In Spanish: Televisión en los Estados Unidos para niños