Broadcasting of sports events
NBC broadcast the first televised National Football League (NFL) game when they carried the 22 October 1939 game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The same year, the first nationwide radio broadcast of an NFL championship game was carried on the Mutual Broadcasting System. While the NFL had weak television deals that ranked behind college football and even the Canadian Football League in the 1950s, the broadcast rights of the NFL would go on to become an important property following the 1958 NFL Championship and the later establishment of the American Football League in 1960. "Monday Night Football", "NFL on Fox", and "NBC Sunday Night Football" have changed the landscape of American football broadcasts, including the scheduling of the Super Bowl, transforming it from an afternoon broadcast into a primetime spectacle. The price for the NFL's broadcast rights has increased steadily over the past several decades, in part because of bidding wars between the numerous networks and the fear of losing stature due to the loss of NFL programming; as of the most recent contract the league nets annual fees of over $6 billion, or half of the league's overall revenue, from television rights alone. Four of the five major sports television units in the United States, and the four companies that control all of the major broadcast networks, currently own some NFL rights.
NFL on CBS
On November 4, 1973, local San Francisco CBS affiliate KPIX (now an owned-and-operated station of the network) experimented with a "simulcast" in which the station kept switching back and forth between the network's broadcasts of a San Francisco 49ers game (against the Detroit Lions) and an Oakland Raiders game (against the New York Giants) that were being played at the same time, with frequent cuts to studio host Barry Tompkins. The station received many complaints from viewers, however, and the experiment was not repeated. This resulted in the NFL instituting new rules for markets that had two teams, which basically state that teams televised in two markets must play their games at different times in the day or week, or one of the teams must be on the road, or the teams' games must be on different networks. (For example, an NFL schedule for a given week in markets with two team franchises might look like this: Oakland at Kansas City, 1:00 p.m.; New York Giants at Philadelphia, 1:00 p.m.; San Diego at San Francisco, 4:15 p.m.; and New England at New York Jets, 8:00 p.m.)