This version of the chart shows new sports programming in light blue set against the total new programming shown in a darker blue. This is just a next step in characterizing the blend of workloads embodied in new television programming. Sports represents are large portion of the new content shown on television and its usage is significantly different than say episodic programming.
As part of developing new models and designs for video in the cloud, we started collecting data on how much new programming is aired on television over various intervals of time. The following chart, updated hourly, summarizes that data. It shows how many hours of new television is aired in the Boston area during every hour over a trailing seven day period.
Last updated at 10:00PM, 07-Sep-2010 EDT
41991 programs (46472 hours) of new TV aired in the 343 days since 29-Sep-2009
- 10943 programs (21647 hours) of new sports
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The Y axis represents the number of hours of new content aired at a given time represented on the X axis. The vertical grid lines mark midnight (00:00 hours) of the day indicated below. The current day and time is marked with a vertical red line and will move to the right as the day progresses.
The data should be representative of how much new content is made available to subscribers of a large modern U.S. cable TV provider. Not surprisingly, with both episodic programs and sports in high season, a comparatively large amount of new content is getting added each day. One can also see that the largest amount of new content is aired during early evening and prime time hours (6pm-11pm), except on weekends when live sporting events create significant bursts during the afternoon and early evening hours [1].
[1] See daypart on wikipedia.org for a description of prime time.
What channels do you include in these figures? Only local ones? Do you include talk and news shows? I would think those are “new content” and the curves should be flatter.
The intent is to account for all new content that is made available to a consumer of a complete cable television lineup in the Boston area. We continue to refine the characterization and we may include other cities in future versions of the post.