Ted Turner, Carol Burnett,

Joanie Mitchell, Ted Leonesis, and you.

Hey, it's Ben Skoda,

and this is a special archived episode of a Kimboe.

Today, when most people think of Ted Turner, perhaps they think of CNN, TBS, or Jane Fonda.

But Ted Turner was a pioneer in our understanding of carriage and how it changes the media landscape.

Let's go back 50 or 75 years and realize that if you bought a television, which almost everyone did, it came with a tuner.

You could change the channel.

In the old days you had to stand up and walk across the room to do it and then they invented the remote control.

It came with 13 channels.

This was the VHF band of the spectrum. If you wanted to broadcast on one of these channels you needed a

license from the FCC. They were pretty cheap to get at first but as more and more people got a television, the value of

one of these licenses went up.

On televisions later on, starting in the 60ss there was a second dial. This dial was for

UHF broadcasts a different part of the spectrum. These channels weren't worth nearly as much. Chalk it up mostly to laziness.

LASiness and fidelity, the UHF stuff didn't look quite as good as the VHF channels, but mostly people stuck with the three TV networks.

Being one of those networks was practically priceless.

So first, Carol Burnett's variety show was, for its time, hysterically funny.

This here in Canoga Falls would like to send special greetings to our sister city of Belbird,

which is as much a part of us. What you do? We're... was sort of like the best of YouTube every Saturday night.

At its peak, just over 10 million people watched Carol Burnett every single week. Week in and week out, Carol Burnett

owned an hour of time from 10 million people. She got to decide what they would see. She

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