TV Station Icons

I remember how it started. A nondescript transparent station logo in the bottom right-hand corner of an up and coming music channel. You remember it, don't you? The little gray "VH1" logo from the late 80s, early 90s?

It stayed on just that channel for a long time. None of the other TV stations had picked up on it. Soon, a few other channels picked up on the idea, and began displaying their logo in the bottom right-hand corner of your TV screen. More followed.

Today, damn near every TV station has its logo populating that corner. CBS, NBC, UPN, Travel Channel, AMC, Discovery, TLC. Comedy Central - They all have it. Even local stations have it. Most take after the VH1 style, and have a simple grey translucent logo, but others have expanded on it. Have you seen TBS's TV Station Icon? It's disgusting! Normally, it just says:

SUPERSTATION

..but the idiots in marketing thought it would be cool to animate the logo using explosions and text effects! Now, what should be an unintrusive station ID logo now animates and fills up to 1/4th of the screen at times. And since these logos never air during commercials, your attention is diverted to this silly animating logo during the TV show you are trying to watch.

And no, it's not animating for the hell of it. It's animating to advertise! "Watch WWF vs. WCW Tonight at 8!" (Explosion) "Only on TBS!" (Blue Flame effects) SUPERSTATION

Isn't it enough that we have commercials? Now you have to advertise during the TV show itself? I mean damn. How long before we see toothpaste ads scrolling across the bottom of the screen while Star Trek is on? It's sickening.

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EVERYTHING

First of all, there are normal cable systems out there with upwards of around 200 channels. As the Big Four networks have noticed, broadcast television ratings have been falling pretty rapidly compared to the ratings they were getting back in the 60s-80s. This is because all of those cable channels are robbing them of viewers. Think about how much television you watch, and think about what portion of it is on a major broadcast network like NBC, CBS, ABC, or Fox. Now, how much of it is one of those other 196 channels? If you said you watch more cable than the major networks, you aren't alone. The major networks are trying everything they can to make themselves and their shows well known because they are facing pretty large falls in profits. Those little icons in the corner are part of branding logo recognition, and making sure that people know what channel they are looking at. Also note that most TV sets nowadays either automatically detect or let you program what number is what channel (for example, the little TNT that appears in the corner when you hit "Display" on your remote). This is yet another way to make sure the viewer knows what he or she is watching (although less obtrusively than bugs, since they aren't hard coded into the signal...)

The second reason for these icons ties into the competition between channels. Before bugs were common, many channels would steal other channel's video and rebroadcast it. I don't mean entire shows, but things like exclusive video on the news, things of that nature. If another channel chooses to broadcast that video and it has the original channel's logo, they give their competitor free advertising and tell the whole world they are stealing. However, this has become less important as networks usually just cover up the other channel's bugs with their own so the viewer doesn't see the logo on the original video, just the thieving channel's icon.