NBC's peacock logo was invented to sell colour television
In 1956 NBC unveiled a stylised peacock to show off its pioneering colour broadcasts, and the Peacock Network nickname stuck. The company was already three decades old by then, founded in 1926 as America's first major broadcast network, and it had to be pried loose from its parent by antitrust regulators.
The Radio Corporation of America created NBC in 1926, and early ownership was shared among General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T and even the United Fruit Company. In 1932 the federal government forced GE to give up RCA and NBC over antitrust violations. Starting life as a radio network, NBC pioneered commercial television in 1939 and introduced colour in 1953. The companies behind it were central to building Rockefeller Center in New York, where the network still has its headquarters in what is now the Comcast Building.
Corporate control has circled around. GE bought RCA back for 6.4 billion dollars in late 1986, kept NBC and quickly closed or sold most of RCA's other businesses. In 2004 the French group Vivendi Universal folded its entertainment arm into GE's, creating NBCUniversal. Comcast took a controlling stake in 2011 and bought out GE's remainder in 2013. NBC and Universal Studios are the two flagship names of that combined business.
The schedule contains some of the longest-running shows on American television. Meet the Press has aired since 1947, Today since 1952, The Tonight Show nationally since 1954 and Saturday Night Live since 1975. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which premiered in 1999, entered its 26th season in October 2024, making it the longest-running live-action series in US prime-time history.
NBC remains one of the traditional Big Three networks along with ABC and CBS. As of 2025 it supplies 87 hours of regular programming a week, including 22 hours of prime time, to 12 owned stations and affiliates in almost every US market. Some of those signals also reach viewers in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean through pay television or across borders over the air.
Source: NBC
