American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company (ABC), legally American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., is an American commercial broadcastingtelevision network that serves as the flagship property of the Disney Television Group division of The Walt Disney Company. The youngest of the "Big Three" American television networks, the network is sometimes referred to as the Alphabet Network, as its initialism also represents the first three letters of the English alphabet in order.

ABC launched as a radio network in 1943, as the successor to the NBC Blue Network, which had been purchased by Edward J. Noble. It was simply called The Blue Network until June of 1945 when it became The American Broadcasting Company (ABC). It extended its operations to television in 1948, following in the footsteps of established broadcast networks CBS and NBC, as well as the lesser-known DuMont. In the mid-1950s, ABC merged with United Paramount Theatres (UPT), a chain of movie theaters that formerly operated as a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. Leonard Goldenson, who had been the head of UPT, made the then-new television network profitable by helping to develop and green-light many successful television series. In the 1980s, after purchasing an 80 percent interest in cable sports channel ESPN, the network's corporate parent, American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., merged with Capital Cities Communications, owner of several television and radio stations and print publications, to form Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which in turn merged into Disney in 1996.

ABC has eight owned-and-operated and more than 230 affiliated television stations throughout the United States and its territories. Some ABC-affiliated stations can also be seen in Canada via pay-television providers, and certain other affiliates can also be received over-the-air in areas near the Canada–United States border, although most of its prime time programming is subject to simultaneous substitution regulations for pay television providers imposed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to protect rights held by domestically based networks. ABC News, through ABC News Radio, provides news and feature content to over 1,900 affiliated radio stations.

ABC is headquartered on Riverside Drive in Burbank, California, directly across the street from Walt Disney Studios and adjacent to the Team Disney – Roy E. Disney Animation Building.

The network maintains secondary offices at 7 Hudson Square in New York City's Lower Manhattan neighborhood, which houses its broadcast center and the headquarters of its news division, ABC News. Until early 2025, the network's East Coast operations were based at 77 West 66th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Since 2007, when ABC Radio (later known as Cumulus Media Networks) was sold to Citadel Broadcasting, ABC has reduced its broadcasting operations almost exclusively to television, though it continues to produce ABC News Radio, and a new ABC Radio (later renamed ABC Audio) was established in 2015.