Biography|Ted Turner — The Superstation Signal That Left This Midtown Studio

On 17 December 1976 the signal that had been a local UHF curiosity in Atlanta left this building for the rest of the country.

Turner Communications had leased time on a satellite. Cable systems that had never heard of channel 17 could now pull WTCG out of the sky.

The studio was still 1018 West Peachtree Street Northwest, the old WAGA plant Turner had taken over six years earlier.

What changed was the audience. A station that sold ads in one Southern market suddenly had a national footprint without buying a network of affiliates.

The mix stayed cheap and sticky: movies Turner owned, cartoons, wrestling, and Atlanta Braves games he had begun carrying in 1973 and then locked in by buying the club itself in January 1976 for a price reported at about ten million dollars.

The Braves were programming as much as they were a baseball team. A hundred and fifty nights a year filled hours that would otherwise have been purchased film.

Cable operators called the result a superstation. In 1979 the calls became WTBS. The corporate name became Turner Broadcasting System.

The Peachtree rooms did not look like a network headquarters. They looked like a converted local shop with a tall stick out back.

That was the point. Turner did not wait for a midtown campus or a downtown atrium. He put a local independent on a bird and let cable systems do the rest.

The later CNN newsroom on Techwood, and the CNN Center atrium after that, grew from this experiment in distribution.

The building on the lot today is Midtown office space. The original tower is gone. The frequency survived as Peachtree TV, long after Turner sold the station.

Stand on West Peachtree and the insight is spatial. National cable news did not begin in New York. The first nationwide Turner signal left a two-storey studio a few blocks from Tenth Street.

Photo: Bernard Gotfryd, April 1985, public domain, Library of Congress. Street: Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta, Wallyg, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.