Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon (commonly shortened to Nick) is an American pay television channel and the flagship property of the Nickelodeon Group, a corporate umbrella within the television division of Skydance. Launched on April 1, 1979, as the first cable channel for children, it is primarily aimed at children and adolescents aged 2 to 17, along with a broader family audience through its programming blocks.
The channel began as a test broadcast on December 1, 1977, as part of QUBE, an early cable television system broadcast locally in Columbus, Ohio. On April 1, 1979, the channel was renamed Nickelodeon and launched to a new nationwide audience, with Pinwheel as its inaugural program. The network was initially commercial-free and remained without advertising until 1984. Nickelodeon gained a rebranding in programming and image that year, and its ensuing success led to it and its sister networks MTV and VH1 being sold to Viacom in 1985.
Nickelodeon began expanding as a franchise model with the addition of sister channels and program blocks. Nick Jr. launched as a morning preschool block in 1988, and eventually spun-off into the Nick Jr. Channel in 2009. Nicktoons, based on Nickelodeon's flagship brand for original animated series, launched as a standalone channel in 2002. Noggin, an interactive educational brand created in partnership with Sesame Workshop, existed as a television channel from 1999 to 2009, and a mobile streaming service from 2015 to 2024. Two blocks aimed at teenage audiences, Nickelodeon's TEENick and Noggin's The N, were merged to form the TeenNick channel in 2009.
It was brought under common ownership with long-time rival turned sister channel Cartoon Network following the 2026 acquisition of Cartoon Network's parent company Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance (now known as Skydance).
As of December 2023, Nickelodeon was available to approximately 70 million pay television households in the United States, down from its peak of 101 million households in 2011.
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