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[[File:Macys-parade-1979.jpg|right|300px|thumb|Tom the Turkey and [[Underdog (TV series)|Underdog]] arriving at [[Macy's Herald Square]] during the 1979 edition of the parade.]]
===Official broadcasts===
More than 44 million people typically watch the parade on television on an annual basis. It was first televised locally in New York City in 1939 as an experimental broadcast on NBC's W2XBS (now [[WNBC]]).<ref>"Television" section of "Today on the Radio", ''The New York Times'', November 23, 1939, p. 40.</ref> No television stations broadcast the parade in 1940 or 1941, but local broadcasts resumed when the parade returned in 1945 after the wartime suspension.<ref>"Radio Today" (with television listings), ''The New York Times'', November 20, 1941, p. 54.</ref><ref>"Radio Today" (with television listings), ''The New York Times'', November 22, 1945, p. 36.</ref> The parade began its network television appearances on [[CBS]] in 1948, the year that major, regular television network programming began.<ref>"Radio and Television", ''The New York Times'', November 15, 1948, p. 44.</ref><ref>"Radio and Television", ''The New York Times'', November 21, 1949, p. 44.</ref> [[NBC]] has been the official broadcaster of the event since 1953. As of 2024, NBC pays Macy's $20 million per year for the license to be the parade's official broadcaster; the parade earns a substantial profit for the network, with ad buys averaging $900,000 per 30-second commercial in 2023—a fee comparable to ''[[NBC Sunday Night Football]]''—bringing in a gross revenue of $52 million.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Knolle |first=Sharon |date=2024-11-26 |title=Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Broadcast Rights Leap to Potential $60 Million Price Tag for NBC {{!}} Report |url=https://www.thewrap.com/macys-thanksgiving-day-parade-nbc-broadcast-rights-contract-price/ |access-date=2024-11-26 |website=TheWrap |language=en-US}}</ref>
At first, the telecasts were only an hour long. The telecast then expanded to two hours in 1961,<ref>"Television", ''The New York Times'', November 23, 1961, p. 71.</ref> reduced to 90 minutes in 1962, reverted to two hours in 1965, and expanded to all three hours of the parade in 1969.<ref>"Television", ''The New York Times'', November 27, 1969, p. 75.</ref> The event began to be broadcast in color in 1960.<ref>"Television", ''The New York Times'', November 24, 1960, p. 67.</ref> NBC airs the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade live in the Eastern Time Zone as well as [[Puerto Rico]] and the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]], as the network uses broadcast feeds from that time zone (which due to time differences starts at 10:00 a.m. [[Atlantic Time Zone|AST]]), but [[broadcast delay|tape delays]] the telecast elsewhere in the continental U.S. and territories from the [[Central Time Zone]] westward to allow the program to air in the same 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. timeslot across its [[owned-and-operated station|owned-and-operated]] and [[network affiliate|affiliated]] stations (except for [[Guam]], which airs it the day after Thanksgiving at 9:00 a.m. local time, as the territory is located west of the [[International Date Line]] and therefore a day ahead from the rest of the United States); following the morning program's expansion to three hours in 2000 (it eventually expanded to four hours in 2007), NBC's ''[[Today (NBC program)|Today]]'' only aired for two hours on Thanksgiving morning, pre-empting the last two talk-focused hours of the show for the day until 2022; beginning in 2023 with the parade coverage being extended a half-hour earlier, the Thanksgiving edition of ''Today'' broadcasts for 90 minutes that day (similar to its Saturday broadcasts). For the 2009 edition, NBC began airing a same-day, three-hour afternoon rebroadcast of the parade following the [[National Dog Show]] (replacing the annual broadcast of ''Miracle on 34th Street'', which NBC had lost the broadcast television rights to that year).
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