Telecommunications
In 1935, at the urging of Governor Cox's son, James M. Cox Jr., Cox entered the radio business starting with WHIO in Dayton. Governor Cox purchased The Atlanta Journal in 1939 as well as radio station WSB. On September 29, 1948, Cox's WSB-TV, later referred to as the "Eyes of the South", aired the first television broadcast in Atlanta. WHIO-TV in Ohio's Miami Valley soon followed, airing its first broadcasts on February 23, 1949.[7]
In 1950, Governor Cox purchased The Atlanta Constitution, and in 1962 his son purchased three cable television systems in central Pennsylvania with a total of 11,800 subscribers. The two combined their broadcasting and cable businesses into the publicly traded Cox Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1964, though the newspaper business remained independent as Cox Enterprises.[7]
In 1966, Cox expanded its holdings to purchase television syndicator Walter Schwimmer,[9] followed in 1967 by the purchase of television production company Bing Crosby Productions.[10] Cox subsequently sold off its syndication unit to a new production company, Telecom Productions, in 1970.[11] Cox would reenter the television syndication business, when Cox's subsidiary, TeleRep, established Television Program Enterprises in the late 1970s,[12] before merging with Rysher Entertainment in 1993.[13][14]
As the cable business expanded, it was eventually consolidated and spun off into the new privately owned Cox Cable Communications (CCC) in 1968, which quickly became the second-largest cable TV company. Upon Jim Cox Jr.'s death in 1974, he left his two sisters, Anne Cox Chambers and Barbara Cox, in control of 95% of the privately owned company.[7]
In 1982, CBC moved its headquarters to the Atlanta area and changed its name to Cox Communications, Inc. The company was eventually consolidated into Cox Enterprises. In 1988, then-Executive Vice President Jim Kennedy, grandson of Governor Cox, was promoted to CEO and chairman of Cox Enterprises.[7]
In 1986, Cox Enterprises launched a new subsidiary, Cox Video. It lined up eleven commitments for original video programs, four of them from Media Home Entertainment, which are comedy-based tapes, and seven from Fox Hills Video, which are reality-based tapes, both subsidiaries of Heron Communications. Co-production budgets totaled $1.5 million. Cox Video also acquired the rights to produce video adaptations of the magazines and exercise regulations of Joe Weider, which included Muscle & Fitness, Flex and Men's Fitness & Shape. Peter Bieler served as executive producer on tapes produced by Cox Video, and also served as executive vice president of the studio. The company planned regular releases that sometimes used the magazines' names and would be positioned as companions to Weider's widely distributed equipment. The MHE comedies were ranked in the $100,000 range and the Fox Hills tapes in the $100,000 range.[15]
Over the ensuing decades, Cox made pioneering investments and became the first company to bundle telephone, highspeed internet and digital cable television over a single broadband network.[16]
