Sound film
The primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid- to late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as "talking pictures", or "talkies", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was "The Jazz Singer", released in October 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures.
The Sound of Music (film)
The first American television transmission of "The Sound of Music" was on February 29, 1976 on ABC, which paid $15 million for a one-time only broadcast that became one of the top-rated films ever shown on television to that point. The movie was not shown again until NBC acquired the broadcast rights and telecast the film on February 11, 1979. NBC continued to air the film annually for twenty years. During most of its run on NBC, the film was heavily edited to fit a three-hour time slot—approximately 140 minutes without commercials. The thirty minutes edited out of the original film included portions of the "Morning Hymn and Alleluia" sung by the nuns, part of the dialogue between Mother Abbess and Maria in the abbey, part of Liesl and Rolfe's dialogue preceding "Sixteen Going on Seventeen", Liesl's verse of "Edelweiss" sung with the Captain, the Captain and Baroness waltzing at the party, and minor dialogue cuts within existing scenes.