Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve (NYRE) is an annual New Year's Eve television specialbroadcast by ABC. The special broadcasts primarily from New York City's Times Squareand prominently features coverage of its annual ball drop event, along with live and pre-recorded musical performances by popular musicians from Times Square and Hollywood, in addition to live performances and coverage of festivities from New Orleans.
Its creator and namesake was the entertainer Dick Clark, who conceived New Year's Rockin' Eve as a younger-skewing competitor to Guy Lombardo's popular and long-running New Year's Eve big band broadcasts on CBS. The first two editions, in 1973 and 1974, were hosted by Three Dog Night and George Carlin, respectively, featured Dick Clark assuming the role of Times Square reporter, and were broadcast by NBC. In 1974–75, the program moved to its current home of ABC, and Clark assumed the role of host.
Following the death of Guy Lombardo and the decline of CBS's specials, New Year's Rockin' Eve grew in popularity and became ingrained in pop culture—even prompting Clark himself to make appearances on other programs in parody of his role. To this day, New Year's Rockin' Eve has consistently remained the highest-rated New Year's Eve special broadcast by the United States' major television networks; its 2012 edition peaked at 22.6 million home viewers—not including viewers watching from public locations, which were historically not measured by Nielsen.
Dick Clark hosted New Year's Rockin' Eve annually from 1973 through 1999 and from 2001 through 2004. For the year 2000, Peter Jennings for ABC News's ABC 2000 Today broadcast. In December 2004, Clark suffered from a stroke, which resulted in Regis Philbin serving as guest host. Due to lingering speech impediments from the stroke, Clark ceded hosting duties to Ryan Seacrest the following year, but continued to make limited appearances as a co-host until his death in 2012 (despite his death, his name still remains on the program to this day). Hosting solo since the 2012–13 edition, Seacrest has most recently been joined by Jenny McCarthy as a correspondent from Times Square (succeeded by Lucy Hale, who had been hosting location segments from New Orleans since the 2015–16 broadcast, for the 2019–20 edition), with Ciara serving as the presenter of the Hollywood concert segments. Through its deal with Dick Clark Productions, New Year's Rockin' Eve will remain on ABC through at least 2024.