The Family Channel
On August 1, 1988, the word "Family" was incorporated into the name to better reflect the format, becoming The CBN Family Channel. Commercials were changed as well, showing "Family Moments" such as a family playing checkers, a grandfather bonding with his grandson, and a woman hugging her husband on her wedding day.
By 1990, the network had grown too profitable to remain under the CBN banner without endangering CBN's non-profit status. CBN spun it off to a new company called International Family Entertainment Inc. (run by Robertson's son, Tim, and operated as a joint venture between the Robertson family and Denver-based cable television provider Tele-Communications Inc.), and the name was changed to simply The Family Channel on September 15, 1990; as a stipulation of the sale to International Family Entertainment, the channel was required to continue to carry The 700 Club (a stipulation that Pat Robertson also imposed when the channel was sold to News Corporation in 1998 and then to The Walt Disney Company in 2001). The network gained more visibility when, for several years in the mid-1990s, it was the primary sponsor of Ted Musgrave's #16 Ford in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. At that point, the 1950s sitcoms and westerns were scaled back for more recent drama shows as well as cartoons and (later) game shows (with a mix of both original programming, like Trivial Pursuit and Shop 'til You Drop and reruns of older programming like Jim Lange's Name That Tune and Let's Make a Deal).
In fact, the game show block consisted of the games listed above and also the later era of Split Second and other shows especially produced for the channel such as Shopping Spree, Small Talk, Wait 'til You Have Kids and a revival of It Takes Two, hosted by Dick Clark.
By the early 1990s, it was seen in 47.6 million households. As The Family Channel, it attracted an older audience not sought by advertisers; only about one-third of homes watching the network included children or youth. In 1993, a UK version of the channel launched, eventually turning into a network dedicated to game shows known as Challenge. In addition, The Family Channel attempted a spinoff called The Game Channel, an interactive game show-oriented channel which was set to launch that same year (International Family Entertainment launched another cable channel the following year with Cable Health Club, later renamed FitTV; the network's lineage is in the current-day Discovery network Discovery Fit & Health). The logo was a blue ring with "The" written on the top and "Channel" at the bottom and on it is the word "Family" written in a script font and its color was a blending yellow and red color.
Read more about this topic: Television Networks Preceding ABC Family
Famous quotes containing the words family and/or channel:
“Anytime we react to behavior in our children that we dislike in ourselves, we need to proceed with extreme caution. The dynamics of everyday family life also have a way of repeating themselves.”
—Cathy Rindner Tempelsman (20th century)
“Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)