Battlestar Galactica was television series broadcast on the SciFi or SyFy channel.  It was based on a television series of the same name from the early 1980s.  The first Battlestar Galactica series helped launch the acting career of Dirk Benedict who portrayed Starbuck, a colonial viper pilot.

The Battlestar Galactica premise of human being (or human like beings) fighting against machines comes from the Beserker series of science fiction stories.  In the Beserker series, the beserkers are space faring, artificially intelligent machines that seek out organic life and destroy it.  In the books, it is assumed that machines were built by long dead organic life for the purpose of waging war, but no one has direct knowledge of their origins.  The first TV series has cyclon machines which behave and have similar origins as the beserkers.  The 2nd series clearly states that the cyclons were built by man, and have no desire to exterminate all organic life.