Concept

Graveyard slot

Summary
A graveyard slot (or death slot) is a time period in which a television audience is very small compared to other times of the day, and therefore broadcast programming is considered far less important. Graveyard slots usually displayed in the early morning hours of each day, when most people are asleep. With little likelihood of a substantial viewing audience during this daypart, providing useful television programming during this time is usually considered unimportant; some broadcast stations go off the air during these hours, and some audience measurement systems do not collect measurements for these periods. Some broadcasters may do engineering work at this time. Others use broadcast automation to pass-through network feeds unattended, with only broadcasting authority-mandated personnel and emergency anchors/reporters present at the local station overnight. A few stations use "we're always on" or a variant to promote their 24-hour operation as a selling point, though as this is now the rule rather than the exception it was in the past, it has now mainly become a selling point for a station's website instead. The most well-known graveyard slot in most parts of the world is the overnight television slot, after late night television and before breakfast television/morning show (between 2:00 and 6:00 a.m.). During this time slot, most people are asleep, leaving only insomniacs, intentionally nocturnal people, and irregular shift workers as regular potential audiences. Because of the small number of people in those categories, the overnight shift was historically ignored as a revenue opportunity, although increases in irregular shifts have made overnight programming more viable than it had been in the past. In the United States, for example, research has shown that the number of televisions in use at 4:30 a.m. doubled from 1995 to 2010 (8% to 16%).
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