NBC Europe - NBC Steps In

NBC Steps In

In 1993, the station was having financial difficulties, and was taken over by the American company General Electric, the parent of the NBC television network, and became NBC Super Channel. In 1996, the channel was renamed NBC Europe, but was, from then on, almost always referred to as simply "NBC" on the air.

Most of NBC Europe's prime time programming was produced in Europe, but after 11 pm Central European Time on weekday evenings, the channel aired The Tonight Show, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Later and Saturday Night Live, hence its slogan "Where the Stars Come Out at Night." Most NBC News programs were broadcast on NBC Europe, including Dateline NBC, Time and Again and NBC Nightly News, which was aired live. The Today Show was also initially shown live in the afternoons, but was later broadcast the following morning instead, by which time it was more than half a day old. That meant that all news portions had to be replaced with European updates produced by ITN in London. ITN also supplied the network with the main European newscasts before and after the GE takeover. The European weather was produced by the BBC at first, but was later taken over by NBC in the U.S.

NBC Europe carried virtually no prime time fiction entertainment programs shown on NBC in the US, because they were usually owned and distributed by other studios under the fin-syn rules (which did not apply for Europe). NBC would have had to buy the rights for each country in order to show them on NBC Europe, which would have been too expensive. Even for shows that NBC Studios owned itself, it was generally more financially viable to sell the rights country by country either to broadcast or cable/satellite channels than to air them on NBC Europe. The most notable exceptions to this rule were brief runs of Profiler and The Pretender, as well as short-lived US sitcoms Union Square and Mr. Rhodes. That is widely considered to be one of the main reasons why NBC Europe was ultimately not a success.