Here we present a 5 week trailing view of how much new television programming gets aired. Each cell (a day) contains the date, the number of hours of new TV programming aired that day shown in parentheses, and a graph of how much new programming (total and sports related) aired throughout the day.
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| Last updated at 05:00PM, 03-Sep-2010 EDT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Looking at the chart, one can see that week over week since the start of October, there has been a relative decline in how much new programming is aired. This likely represents a lull between the start of the new season of television programming and the November “sweeps”. During a sweeps month, television service ratings are collected across all markets. The ratings, in turn, are used to set advertising rates and to make programming decisions [1].
Also observe how the curve for a given day of the week is remarkably similar week over week. By far, most new content is aired in the early evening and prime time [2], except on Saturday and Sunday when a significant amount of new programming, especially sports, is aired during the day. This highlights the mutually reinforcing effect of how new programming is aired when viewers are available to watch television and how viewers are attracted to new programming. This effect is a significant driver of the 3 trillion minutes of television that are consumed in a month.
[1] See definition of “Sweeps” at nielsenmedia.com.
[2] See daypart on wikipedia.org for a description of prime time.