Fox Broadcasting Company

The Fox Broadcasting Company (often shortened to Fox and stylized in all caps as FOX) is an American free-to-air television network that is a flagship property of the Fox Corporation. The network is headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New York City, with additional offices at the Fox Broadcasting Center (Also in New York) and at the Fox Television Center in Los Angeles.

Launched on October 9, 1986, as a competitor to the Big Three television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), Fox went on to become the most successful attempt at a fourth television network. It was the highest-rated free-to-air network in the 18–49 demographic from 2004 to 2012, and earned the position as the most-watched American television network in total viewership during the 2007–08 season.

Fox and its affiliated companies operate many entertainment channels in international markets, although these do not necessarily air the same programming as the U.S. network. Most viewers in Canada have access to at least one U.S.-based Fox affiliate, either free-to-air or through a pay television provider, although Fox's National Football League broadcasts and most of its prime time programming are subject to simultaneous substitution regulations for pay television providers imposed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to protect rights held by domestically based networks.

The network is named after 20th Century Fox, Fox's original parent company (and still its major supplier of programming, despite its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company), and indirectly for producer William Fox, who founded one of the movie studio's predecessors, Fox Film. Fox is a member of the North American Broadcasters Association and the National Association of Broadcasters.

Origins
20th Century Fox had been involved in television production as early as the 1950s, producing several syndicated programs. Following the demise of the DuMont Television Network in August 1956 after it became mired in severe financial problems, the NTA Film Network was launched as a new "fourth network". 20th Century Fox would also produce original content for the NTA network. The film network effort would fail after a few years, but 20th Century Fox continued to dabble in television through its production arm, TCF Television Productions, producing series (such as Perry Mason) for the three major broadcast television networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS).

Programming
, Fox currently provides 19 hours of regularly scheduled network programming each week. The network provides fifteen hours of prime time programming to its owned-and-operated and affiliated stations on Monday through Saturdays from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. and Sundays from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. (all times Eastern and Pacific). An hour of late night programming is also offered on Saturdays from 11:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. Eastern and Pacific Time, a former hour of original comedy, but currently a repeat hour for primetime series (though scheduling for that hour varies depending on the market due to late local newscasts airing in the traditional 11:00/10:00 p.m. timeslot on some Fox stations). Weekend daytime programming consists of the paid programming block Weekend Marketplace (airing Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., although the block is not carried by all affiliates and, in some areas, is offered to another station in the market), and the hour-long Sunday morning political discussion show – and the network's only regular national news program – Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace (airing from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. Eastern and Pacific, although the timeslot also varies by market due to local news or public affairs programming).

Sports programming is also provided; usually on weekends (albeit not every weekend year-round), and most commonly airing between 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. or as late as 8:00 p.m. on Sundays (often airing for longer hours during the National Football League season, slightly less during NASCAR season); between 12:00 and 7:00 p.m. (during baseball, college football, and college basketball season) on Saturday afternoons; and during prime time on certain Saturday evenings. The Saturday prime time block – if any sports programming is scheduled for a particular week on that night – currently varies between occasional Premier Boxing Champions events, Major League Baseball, or NASCAR coverage in the late winter and early spring/summer, and college football coverage during the fall.

Stations
, Fox has 17 owned-and-operated stations, and current and pending affiliation agreements with 225 additional television stations encompassing 48 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. possessions; through its Fox Television Stations subsidiary, Fox has the most owned-and-operated stations of the major American commercial broadcast networks. The network has a national reach of 95.77% of all households in the United States (or 299,268,292 Americans with at least one television set). Currently, New Jersey and Delaware are the only U.S. states where Fox does not have a locally licensed affiliate (the former is served by New York City O&O WNYW and Philadelphia O&O WTXF, while the latter is served by WTXF and Salisbury, Maryland affiliate WBOC-DT2).

Fox largely discontinued analog broadcasts on June 12, 2009, as part of the transition to digital television. As a newer broadcast network, Fox still has a few low-power affiliates broadcasting in analog, covering markets like Youngstown, Ohio (WYFX-LD). In some markets, including both of the ones mentioned, these stations also maintain digital simulcasts on a subchannel of a co-owned/managed television station. Fox also maintains a sizeable number of subchannel-only affiliations in cities located outside the 50 largest Nielsen-designated markets that do not have enough full-power stations to support a standalone affiliation or have a low-power station as the only other option as an affiliate; the largest subchannel-only Fox affiliate by market size is WGGB-DT2 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Currently outside Fox's core O&O group, Nexstar Media Group is Fox's largest affiliate group in terms of overall market reach, with fourteen stations (including some former Fox O&Os that were spun off in 2008 to Local TV, which Tribune later acquired in 2013, to finance former Fox parent News Corporation's purchase of The Wall Street Journal); the Sinclair Broadcast Group is the largest operator of Fox stations by numerical total, owning or providing services to 26 Fox-affiliated stations.

Fox previously distributed its programming in markets that did not have enough stations to support an affiliate via Foxnet, a cable channel acting as an alternate national feed for small and certain mid-sized U.S. markets (generally those within the bottom 110 Nielsen media markets) that launched in 1991 and operated until its shutdown on September 12, 2006; the channel featured a master schedule of programs acquired from the syndication market and some brokered programming to fill time slots not occupied by Fox network programming. The concept behind Foxnet served as the basis for The WB 100+ Station Group (launched in September 1998 as the cable-only feed of The WB) and The CW Plus (the immediate successor of The WB 100+, which launched in September 2006 as a cable-only/digital multicast feed of The CW), which both allow the customization of localized branding (which Foxnet did not allow its cable partners to do) in addition to allowing affiliates to sell local advertising.