USA Broadcasting

USA Broadcasting was an American media company owned by the veteran entertainment industry executive Barry Diller. This network was the over-the-air broadcasting arm of USA Network. USAB dates back to the mid-1990s when Diller purchased Silver King Broadcasting and its parent company, Home Shopping Network, Inc., from Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson and Roy Speer. Paxson and Speer had assembled the group to expand Home Shopping Network onto broadcast television. The stations carried the Home Shopping Club. Home Shopping Network, Inc. later brought Universal's cable/TV production units, renaming them USA Networks, Inc., and its broadcast television subsidiary USA Broadcasting in 1998. Diller planned to remove shopping shows from most of the stations' broadcast days and replace them with local and syndicated programs. He wanted to tie each of the stations very closely to the communities they served, and to open up opportunities for locally produced programs. By 2000, four stations were transformed into Diller's new model: WAMI-TV in Miami, WHOT in Atlanta, WHUB in Boston, and KSTR in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. WAMI and KSTR aired local news, talk shows and sporting events.