In 1979, Rick and Dee Ray founded Raycom, Inc. and built it into the United States’ largest independent television network televising live collegiate and football events. The company produced over 10,000 live sports events and produced and sold all the collegiate basketball on ABC network. It also owned post season bowl games and produced the National Academy of Sports Emmy Awards, entertainment specials, and other events. Raycom brought its highly rated programming into local homes on a national basis and purchased time from broadcast stations, thus they controlled 95 percent of related advertising revenue, a risky and bold move for a young company.
Raycom merged with Ellis Communications in the late 1990s. Later, the company was sold to the Alabama Teachers Pension Trust, and the Rays ostensibly, retired in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Since retirement was somewhat boring they formed Nuray Media in 2010. As CEO, Dee operated the company as Nuray Digital. She and her team created one of the largest and most complete digitization facilities in the United States. The team transformed clients’ legacy content from 16mm, 35mm, 70mm film, Beta, and uMatic tape formats to digital formats, up converting many to the incredible 4K digital formats. The company’s major projects included digitizing forty years’ of WRAL-TV news content and 3,600 titles from the University of Miami’s School of Communications catalog of legacy movies, documentaries, news, and cartoons. Other major clients included Universal Studios, Wake Forest University, University of South Carolina, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Paula Dean’s cooking shows. Dee sold Nuray Digital’s assets in 2017 and again retired.
Nuray Media entered the literary publishing realm in 2023 with its first title, Unstoppable by George Hirthler.