American cable and satellite television network Freeform was originally launched as the CBN Satellite Service on April 29, 1977, and has gone through four different owners and six different name changes during its history. This article details the network's existence from its founding by the Christian Broadcasting Network to its current ownership by The Walt Disney Company, which renamed the network to Freeform on January 12, 2016.
CBN Satellite Service (1977–1988) The network was founded by Pat Robertson as the CBN Satellite Service (CBN Satellite Network), an arm of his television ministry, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). When the channel launched on April 29, 1977, it became the first basic cable channel to be transmitted via satellite from its launch and, effectively, the first national basic cable-originated network. Initially, the network offered only religious programs aimed at a Christian audience. The offerings on the CBN Satellite Service during its early years included CBN's flagship news/talk show, The 700 Club (which aired three times per day every Monday through Friday in the late-morning and at night), along with programs from many notable and lesser-known television evangelists. As a result, a few televangelists began to produce stripped programs to air on the network each weekday. The CBN Satellite Service grew its subscriber base to 10.9 million households by May 1981.
On September 1, 1981, the channel was relaunched as the CBN Cable Network. At that time of the name change, it was concurrently repositioned as an advertiser-supported "family-friendly" entertainment network, although the channel continued to offer religious programs that occupied about a third of its daily schedule. Entertainment programming that aired on the channel during this period included various classic television series (consisting of classic sitcoms from the 1950s and westerns from the 1950s and 1960s such as My Little Margie, Wagon Train, The Virginian and Bachelor Father), reruns of game shows, older movies, and some family-oriented drama series. CBN Cable also produced its first original series with the relaunch including a weekday-morning talk show, US a.m. and the faith-based soap opera Another Life.
The network also aired – and was even involved in the production of a few of them – a handful of Christian or family-friendly animated series, including some anime – such as CBN's own co-productions with Japanese animation studio Tatsunoko Production, Superbook and The Flying House and the television pilot sitcom Help Wanted; the channel also carried English-dubbed versions of Honey, Honey and Leo the Lion. Religious programming retained a sizeable portion of CBN Cable's schedule; in addition to continuing to run weekday airings of The 700 Club, non-CBN-produced ministry programs were relegated to Saturday and Sunday evenings, and Sunday mornings, encompassing only 22% of the network's programming lineup by 1990.
The channel's decision to mix secular and religious programs within its schedule mirrored the programming format used by the independent television stations that CBN had owned (then based in six markets) at the time of the rebranding. Additional programming that joined the CBN Cable lineup later in the decade included Hazel, Father Knows Best, The Big Valley, and Gunsmoke, plus foreign acquisitions The Campbells and Butterfly Island. Under the new format, the national distribution of the CBN Cable Network had grown from 28 million households in May 1985 to 35.8 million in May 1987.
The Family Channel (1988–1998)
On August 1, 1988, the word "Family" was incorporated into the channel's name to better reflect its programming format, rebranding as The CBN Family Channel; however, it was identified in on-air and print promotions as simply The Family Channel, which became official on August 1, 1989 with the formal rollout of a revised logo omitting the "CBN" moniker (which had been used for movie presentations since January 1989). On September 11 of that year, "Fun Town", a daily children's program block featuring animated and live-action series from DIC Enterprises (currently WildBrain) premiered as part of The Family Channel's morning and weekend afternoon lineups. Under its programming deal with the company, DIC would produce four specials per quarter that would air on the channel, including holiday specials and a film version of the animated series The New Archies, although those plans would ultimately be scrapped.
On January 8, 1990, CBN spun off The Family Channel to International Family Entertainment Inc. (a newly formed company founded by Pat Robertson's eldest son and CBN Family network president, Timothy Robertson, and operated as a joint venture between the Robertson family and John C. Malone, owner of Denver-based cable television provider Tele-Communications Inc. and multimedia firm Liberty Media) for $250 million in convertible securities. The Robertsons paid $150,000 to acquire 4.5 million shares and a controlling ownership interest in IFE, with Pat and Tim subsequently purchasing an additional 1.5 million shares.
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 Fox Family Worldwide in 1997 and then to The Walt Disney Company in 2001). This time-buy clause (which also mandates that the program air at suitable time slots that would allow it to attract decent viewership) was the only requirement that Robertson included in sales terms for the network to its subsequent owners. However, public assumption had conflated for many years that this sole existing stipulation was one of two that he included following the sale of the network by CBN; another contractual clause that Robertson was alleged to have added in the sale agreement to Fox required any future secular owners to maintain the word "Family" in the network's name in perpetuity. When Disney announced on October 6, 2015, that it would rebrand the network as Freeform, ABC Family president Tom Ascheim noted that there was no record of such a clause ever having been in place (although some published sources – including a reference in James B. Stewart's book on former chairman/CEO Michael Eisner's tenure at eventual owner Disney, DisneyWar – have only stated insofar that a clause including "Family" as a required part of the name was incorporated into previous carriage agreements for the channel with cable and satellite providers).
By 1989, the channel was seen in 47.3 million households, with its distribution jumping to 54 million homes (or 92% of all U.S. households with a cable television subscription) by 1992. At that point, the 1950s sitcoms and westerns that had long been featured on its lineup were scaled back, in favor of more recent drama series as well as cartoons and later, game shows (with a mix of both original programs like Trivial Pursuit and Shop 'til You Drop, and reruns of older game shows such as Name That Tune and Let's Make a Deal). The channel's weekday afternoon game show block consisted of the aforementioned programs along with the later episodes of Split Second and other shows specifically produced for the channel (such as Shopping Spree, Small Talk, Wait 'til You Have Kids and revivals of It Takes Two, Bordertown, Rin Tin Tin: K-9 Cop, Maniac Mansion and The New Zorro.
In March 1992, the Christian Broadcasting Network sold its interest in International Family Entertainment, when the company announced plans to become publicly traded, selling 6.66 million shares valued at $100 million, at a price between $14 and $16 per share (however, Pat Robertson retained ownership of 3.6 million shares in IFE until the company's sale to News Corporation); IFE would also sell 3.33 million shares of stock to the public. In January 1993, IFE purchased TVS Entertainment, a British broadcaster that had previously operated the South & South East of England franchise of the ITV network, and also owned MTM Enterprises, for $68.5 million.
That year, International Family Entertainment and Flextech jointly launched an international version of The Family Channel in the United Kingdom which broadcast a mixture of Family Channel's original programmes along with a small amount of UK-exclusive original shows and repeats from the TVS archive. On February 3, 1997, that channel eventually relaunched as the game show-dedicated network Challenge (an outgrowth of "Family Challenge Weekend", a weekend game show block that debuted on the channel in October 1996), following IFE's sale of its 61% controlling interest to Flextech in April 1996. In addition, in the United States, The Family Channel attempted to launch a spin-off network with a very similar format to that which the U.K. Family Channel evolved into; The Game Channel was intended as an interactive game show-oriented channel that was also set to launch in 1993. International Family Entertainment launched another cable channel, the Cable Health Club, on October 4, 1993, which was made available to cable providers without a carriage fee; the lineage of that network – which was later renamed FitTV – is traceable to the current-day Warner Bros. Discovery-owned network Discovery Life.
The network gained more visibility when, for a four-year period from 1994 to 1997, it served as the primary sponsor of Ted Musgrave's #16 Ford Thunderbird in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series.
Fox Family (1998–2001) Purchase by Fox Kids Worldwide
In early 1997, Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation entered into discussions to purchase a stake in The Family Channel with International Family Entertainment as a partner, seeking to bring it under its Fox Kids joint venture with Haim Saban. On June 11, 1997, News Corporation purchased International Family Entertainment for $1.9 billion. The latter company's assets were split within News Corporation's portfolio: The Family Channel was merged into Fox Kids Worldwide, a joint venture between majority owners News Corporation and Saban (which each owned a 49.5% share in the company), and media investment firm Allen & Company (which owned the remaining 1%), which was subsequently renamed Fox Family Worldwide following the completion of the acquisition.
The Family Channel was renamed Fox Family Channel – though on-air promotions typically referred to the network as just "Fox Family" – on August 15, 1998. With the change in ownership, Fox Family's operations were also migrated from the Christian Broadcasting Network's headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and integrated with the operations of some of News Corporation's other cable channels in Los Angeles at the Fox Network Center (located on the 20th Century Fox backlot in Century City). The MTM Enterprises library was assumed by 20th Television.
Early programming