The American Christian Television System (ACTS) was an American religious television network that was founded by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Plans for the network involved a distribution reach through a combination of low-power and full-power broadcast television stations, most of which were to be built, and carriage on cable television providers.
Religious denominations had long been recipients of free air time from broadcast stations. This was often because stations had a need to fulfill "public interest" obligations in order to maintain their licenses.[1] It was estimated that by the mid-1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention received approximately $10 million in donations annually in the form of 2,500 free weekly broadcasts.[1] The programming that religious networks produced included (in addition to services and teaching) family-oriented entertainment programs and occasionally cartoons, such as JOT. ACTS would expand on these, originally intending on drawing its programming almost exclusively from in-house sources. ACTS was the first television network established by a Protestant denomination.[2]
ACTS launched in 1984 as a non-commercial service, but was converted into a for-profit network in 1988. In 1992, ACTS began sharing channel space with a similarly formatted cable network, the Vision Interfaith Satellite Network, with the two being co-branded under the name VISN-ACTS. The unified channel later evolved into the Faith & Values Channel and Odyssey, before eventually relaunching (with minimal religious content) as the Hallmark Channel in 2001 following its purchase by Crown Media Holdings. ACTS ceased operations in 2003.
^ abHorsfield, Peter G. (1984). White, Robert A. (ed.). Religious Television The American Experience. Communication and Human Values. New York: Longman. pp. 3–11. ISBN 0-582-28432-5.
^Martin, Dan (November 1981). "A Home in the Sky: Southern Baptists establish the first television network by a Protestant denomination". Religious Broadcasting. 13 (9). National Religious Broadcasters. ISSN 0034-4079.
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