The Paramount Television Network was a venture in the late 1940s by American film corporation Paramount Pictures to organize a television network. The company had built television stations KTLA in Los Angeles and WBKB in Chicago, and had invested $400,000 in the DuMont Television Network, which operated stations in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. The Paramount Television Network aired several programs, including the Emmy award-winning children's series Time for Beany, and distributed them to an ad-hoc network of stations. It signed affiliation agreements with more than 50 television stations in 1950; despite this, most of Paramount's series were not widely viewed outside the West Coast. The Federal Communications Commission prevented the studio from acquiring additional television stations. Escalating disputes between Paramount and DuMont concerning breaches of contract, company control, and network competition erupted regularly between 1940 and 1956, and led to the dismantling of the DuMont Network. Paramount continued to produce series for other networks, and re-entered the broadcast network field in 1995 with the United Paramount Network. (Full article...)
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