Bill Tush Ted Turner revolutionized the information world when he bought Channel 17, a local Atlanta television station, and started bouncing its signal off of a satellite so people everywhere could watch, and it quickly turned into the first cable "superstation," running content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Before Turner forever changed the industry, the Big Three national networks (ranked in order of their marketshare) were CBS, NBC, and ABC. The three major networks all stopped offering content during the early morning hours and from around 3:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. every morning, only a test pattern was broadcast over the airways. Ted owned the rights to a lot of old movies and the Atlanta Braves, which meant he had a virtually unlimited supply of content. The FCC decreed that once Channel 17 evolved into a national network, Turner had to broadcast a news program in order to maintain the station's federal license. In a move of sheer genius, Ted didn't even try to go against the Walter Cronkite-style news anchors during the "normal" news hour from 6:00 p.m to 7:00 p.m. Instead, Ted hired a comedian named Bill Tush and offered the news at 3:00 a.m. Turner figured nobody was going to watch his station for the news, anyway, but at that hour of the morning, his SuperStation literally had no other competition, and Tush made it fun to watch the news. Some of his on-air stunts were hilarious and became legendary, as the video below demonstrates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy8MTBxP7no Another brilliant and innovative move was when Turner began … [Read more...]