16 Facts About Tribune Entertainment

Tribune Entertainment was a television production and broadcast syndication company owned and operated by Tribune Broadcasting.

Tribune Entertainment was started in 1964 as a subsidiary of WGN-TV in Chicago.

Many programs offered from Tribune Entertainment have been broadcast on the company's television stations.

Tribune Entertainment was founded in 1964 as Mid-America Video Tape Productions as a subsidiary of television station WGN-TV in Chicago, in order to syndicate National Barn Dance to several television markets.

In 1982, Tribune Entertainment picked up newspaper film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel under the show name of At the Movies before losing the hosts four years later to Buena Vista Television.

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In 1985, another long-running program that Tribune Entertainment had distributed was the syndicated musical Soul Train, just 9 years after it moved to WGN-TV, from syndication, which debuted in 1971.

In 1987, Tribune Entertainment partnered with rival syndicatior Coca-Cola Telecommunications on an aborted effort of two projects, namely Gunfighter, which was set for a two-hour telefilm on the Tribune Entertainment stations on a barter basis, but it never realized.

That year, Tribune Entertainment Company announced that they would move production of two in-house series, At the Movies and The Farm Report, from the WGN-TV studios in Chicago, to indie production company Polycom in order to make the move a cost-cutting move for the studio, and retains its own crew of producers and distributors in the Chicago area and many engineers at the studio had been laid off too.

In 1990, it split their association with Paramount, with Tribune Entertainment taking sales of both Geraldo and The Joan Rivers Show.

On March 1,1991, Tribune Entertainment had its Geraldo show as the first US program in the USSR under the recent Glasnost policy.

In January 1994, Tribune Entertainment started a country music initiative across broadcast television, concert touring, direct marketing, home video distribution, pay-per-view and radio syndication.

In July 1995, Tribune Entertainment sold 22 episodes of "Road", their canceled country music show, to The Nashville Network for broadcast starting in January 1996.

In 1996, it entered into an agreement with King World Productions to distribute Geraldo, which would remain on the air until 1998 via a joint first-run development pact deal, and Tribune Entertainment to continue handling barter advertising sales of the show.

In January 2003, Tribune Entertainment was signed on as distributor of the DIC Kids Network, which came onto the air, beginning in the fall of 2003.

On December 18,2007, Tribune Entertainment announced it would exit the program distribution business.

In 2010, Tribune Entertainment announced that it would be considering a re-entry into the syndication market with two new talk shows: one a tabloid talk show hosted by Bubba the Love Sponge, and another, "Big Willie".