Broadcasting Company of America

The Broadcasting Company of America (BCA) was a short-lived subsidiary of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). It was formed in May 1926 in order to consolidate AT&T's radio station and network operations into a single organization. However, just two months later AT&T announced that the subsidiary was being sold to the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). This sale took place on November 1, 1926, and RCA reorganized the BCA assets to form the core of National Broadcasting Company's (NBC) network operations, including its "Red Network".

Early AT&T radio development

AT&T had an early interest in radiotelephone development, although initially only as a method for establishing telephone links to locations where it was not possible to string wire lines. Lee de Forest's development of vacuum-tube amplification would prove invaluable for progress in a number of areas. In July 1913 the company spent $50,000 to purchase from the inventor the patent rights for telephone wire amplification, and in 1915 used this innovation to make the first transcontinental telephone calls. In October 1914, the company further purchased the commercial patent rights for radio signaling for $90,000, and in October 1915 conducted test radio transmissions from the Navy's station in Arlington, Virginia, NAA, that were heard as far away as Paris, France and Hawaii.

AT&T's main competitor in the radio field would be the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which was formed in 1919 as a subsidiary of the General Electric (GE). Because no single company held sufficient patents rights to operate radio systems without infringing on other company's patents, a series of cross-licensing agreements were concluded between a series of companies holding key patents, and on July 1, 1920, AT&T signed a comprehensive agreement with GE. These agreements in effect assigned dominance in specified areas of the radio industry to individual participating companies, which eventually would meet with anti-trust challenges.