Early history By the early 1980s, cable television had reached millions of American households and was starting to draw significant audiences away from the "
Big Three"
broadcast television networks. All three networks saw opportunities to expand into cable television in order to protect and grow their audiences, and they all experimented with niche programming. In fact, all three traditional networks introduced arts-related channels within one year of each other.
CBS launched
CBS Cable in 1981, which focused on "
art house" and critical acclaimed programs;
NBC, meanwhile, launched the similarly formatted premium cable network The Entertainment Channel on June 4, 1982.
ABC partnered with the
Hearst Corporation to create its own arts-oriented service, the
Alpha Repertory Television Service. ARTS launched on April 12, 1981, focusing on
highbrow cultural fare such as
opera,
ballet, classical
symphonic performances, dramatic theater productions and select foreign films (besides CBS Cable and the Entertainment Channel, ARTS also competed with
Bravo and the
Public Broadcasting Service). Many cable providers had limited channel
bandwidth at that time over their
headends; as a result, CBS Cable struggled to find channel carriage and an audience, eventually folding in late 1982. However, while ARTS fared no better in finding viewers, it shared channel space with
Nickelodeon, signing on at 9:00 p.m.
Eastern Time after the children's television network ended its broadcast day. That shared channel arrangement was a perfect symbiotic scheduling match for the two networks given their respective audience demographics (the target viewership of ARTS either did not have young children or had sent them to bed by the time the channel began its programming). ARTS had somewhat lower programming costs than CBS Cable, with fewer (and less costly) original programs.
Prime time was normally the most valuable airtime, but not for Nickelodeon – ARTS paid a very low rate to that network for its three evening satellite transponder hours, plus a repeat broadcast at 9:00 p.m.
Pacific Time (according to Hearst executive
Raymond E. Joslin, ARTS did not pay Nickelodeon at all for the first year, and paid a $1 million fee for the second year and $2 million for the third).
Merger with The Entertainment Channel and relaunch as A&E NBC had been facing a similar problem in finding a sufficiently large audience for The Entertainment Channel, which aired such expensive programming as
BBC cultural imports from the
United Kingdom and live broadcasts from
Lincoln Center. Hearst/ABC Video Services and NBC ultimately decided to merge ARTS and The Entertainment Channel to form a single service, the Arts & Entertainment Network (
A&E), which launched on February 1, 1984; ABC would exit the partnership soon afterward (ironically,
the Walt Disney Company, which bought ABC in 1996, would acquire an ownership interest in A&E in the early 1990s). A&E took over the transponder space held by ARTS, as well as that network's timeslot over Nickelodeon's channel space. That summer, A&E announced that it would move the network to its own dedicated transponder and become a separate 24-hour cable channel to take better advantage of valuable satellite time. The move took place on January 1, 1985, with Nickelodeon expanding part of its programming schedule to fill the time period formerly held by A&E with more teen-oriented programming and displaying a
test pattern screen after the network signed off later in the evening. As a result of A&E's separation from Nickelodeon,
MTV Networks President
Bob Pittman commissioned
Geraldine Laybourne, who served as
general manager of Nickelodeon at the time, to develop programming to fill the vacated time period. Laybourne asked programming and branding consultants
Fred Seibert and
Alan Goodman, founders of Fred/Alan Inc. (who launched successful branding campaigns for
MTV when it launched in 1981, and for Nickelodeon in 1984), to come up with programming ideas. Seibert and Goodman came up with the idea to launch a nighttime block of classic television series, modeled after the "Greatest Hits of All Time" oldies radio format, after being presented with over 200 episodes of the 1950s sitcom
The Donna Reed Show. On July 1, 1985,
Nick at Nite launched over Nickelodeon's channel space in the 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. Eastern and Pacific time period, featuring reruns of classic television series from the 1950s to the 1970s. The merged A&E unit retained the same arts-focused and foreign drama programming for the next twenty years, though it eventually drifted towards a direction heavy towards
reality television by 2008 and has long
drifted away from the channel's original remit. ==References==