Graveyard slot
A graveyard 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 are usually situated in the early morning hours of each day, a time 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 may do engineering or other technical work or go off the air during these hours, and some audience measurement systems do not collect measurements for these periods. 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 or social media apps instead.
Programming
Overnight slot
The most well-known graveyard slot in most parts of the world is the overnight slot, the daypart bridging the late night and breakfast television/early morning slots. During this time slot, most people are either asleep or working overnight shifts. Because of the small number of people awake at these times, 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 ; this research coincided with the expansion of early morning newscasts by many local stations during this period.Network overnight programming
The Big Three television networks in the United States all offer regular programming in the overnight slot. Both ABC and CBS carry overnight newscasts with some repackaged content from the day's previous network news broadcasts, with an emphasis on sports scores from West Coast games that typically conclude after 1:00 a.m. ET and international financial markets with the ending of the Australasian, midway through the Indian, and beginning of the European trading day, while NBC replays the NBC News Now streaming news program Top Story with Tom Llamas. Each network also produces its early morning newscast at 4:00 a.m. ET so that it may be tape-delayed to air as a lead-in to local news.The graveyard slots' lack of importance sometimes benefits programs; producers and program-makers can afford to take more risks, as there is less advertising revenue at stake. For example, an unusual or niche program may find a chance for an audience in a graveyard slot, or a formerly popular program that no longer merits an important time slot may be allowed to run in a graveyard slot instead of being removed from the schedule completely. However, abusing this practice may lead to channel drift if the demoted programs were presented as channel stars at some time.
The overnight period is also noted for the prevalence of cheaply produced local advertisements which allow an advertiser to purchase time on the station for a low cost, advertisements for services of a sexual nature, direct response advertising for products and services otherwise seen during infomercials, and public service announcements airing in these time slots due to the reduced importance of advertising revenue.
Time-shifted programming
Since the advent of home video recording, some programs in this slot may be transmitted mainly with time-shifting in mind; in the past, the BBC offered specialized overnight strands such as BBC Select, and the BBC Learning Zone. The BBC's current "Sign Zone" strand broadcasts repeat programmes with in-vision interpretation in British Sign Language. Some channels may carry adult-oriented content in the graveyard slot, depending on local regulations. Live events from other time zones may sometimes fall in overnight slots, such as daytime events from the Asia-Pacific region on channels in the Americas, and prime-time events from the Americas on channels in Europe for example. Some anime-oriented streaming services have arrangements with Japanese networks to premiere episodes at the same time as their domestic television airings, often falling within the overnight hours in the Americas, particularly Cartoon Network's late night Toonami block on Adult Swim, which airs from Saturday nights to Sunday mornings.From 1988 to 2014 in the United States, some cable networks aired educational programs during overnight hours as part of the Cable in the Classroom initiative, intended for educators to tape for later presentation to their students.
Syndicated programming
Since the 1980s, graveyard slots on American broadcast stations, once populated by broadcasts of syndicated reruns and old movies, have increasingly been used for program-length infomercials or simulcasting of home shopping channels, which provide a media outlet with revenue and a source of programming without any programming expenses or the possible malfunctions which might come with going off-the-air. In the United States, graveyard slots are also used as a de facto "death slot" for syndicated programs that either failed to find an audience or which a station acquired but otherwise has no room to air in a more appropriate time slot where the program would otherwise benefit; in previous years, the most often seen original programming in the overnight period were low-rated game shows and daytime talk shows being burned off, with the former being more common in the 1980s and the latter the following decade. During the 1980s and 1990s, some stations—particularly news-producing stations that contracted with CNN or CONUS Communications to provide supplemental coverage of national and world news—also used the overnight period to simulcast 24-hour news services Headline News and All News Channel.In many cases where a television station carries an irregularly scheduled special event, breaking news or severe weather coverage that preempts a network or syndicated program, the station may elect to air the preempted programming in a graveyard slot during the same broadcast day to fulfill their contractual obligations. Additionally, in markets with sports teams whose coaches' and team highlights shows preempt programs in the prime access hour before primetime, the overnight period also allows a preempted program to air in some form on a station without penalty to the syndicator, or for stations to air network programming preempted for local-interest programming, breaking news or weather, or sporting events.
In almost every market in the United States, MyNetworkTV has seen its timeslot downgraded to the graveyard slot, sometimes sharing secondary affiliations with digital multicast television networks carried on digital subchannels. Originally launched as a general broadcast network in 2006 meant for primetime clearance, following the merger of two smaller networks—The WB and UPN—into The CW, the network saw its entire slate of original programming fail in the ratings, and by 2010 the network transitioned to a syndication service carrying nightly rerun blocks of syndicated programming from broadcast networks and cable channels. Generally, this is done as the stations of MyNetworkTV have become part of duopolies with major network affiliate stations and those stations have used the network's affiliates to carry extended primetime local newscasts, local sports and encore runs of its sister Fox affiliate's syndicated programs which provide steadier ratings and revenue than MyNetworkTV's non-original schedule.
News programming
Local news programming has also aired in the overnight slot in various forms; between the 1960s and the mid-1980s, many American television stations ran abbreviated "sign-off editions" providing brief summaries of local, national and international headlines, sports scores and a short- to medium-range weather forecast, including overnight breaking news stories that may have occurred after the station's late newscast earlier in the evening. One such station, Chicago independent station WFLD, utilized the KeyFax teletext system to provide an overnight news service, known as Nite-Owl, that aired until the resumption of regular programming each day from 1981 to 1982. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many news-producing stations began to rebroadcast their late-evening newscasts and live sports scores, primarily for the convenience of late-shift workers who were not awake hours earlier for the broadcast's initial airing.By the 2000s, with the increasing prominence of online news coverage by many stations, the practice of airing late news rebroadcasts went into decline in favor of syndicated programs, extended feeds of overnight network newscasts and infomercials, though some NBC affiliates that abandoned the practice years earlier would bring back late news rebroadcasts to their late-night schedules after the network ceded the 1:35 a.m. ET timeslot following the 2021 cancellation of A Little Late with Lilly Singh. Since the late 2000s in the United States many stations have offered an increasingly early local newscast, which now begins as early as 4:00 a.m. in some major and mid-sized markets, targeting those who work early shifts or are returning from late shifts; this early newscast would fit into the overnight daypart rather than the early morning slot.
Public affairs and educational programming
In addition to being used to fulfill contractual obligations for network and syndicated programming, graveyard slots can also be used as dumping grounds for government-mandated public affairs programming, as well as in-house programming a station group is mandated by their parent company to carry that would otherwise be unpalatable in prime timeslots. One example of the latter mandated by Sinclair Broadcast Group in the United States is The Right Side, a public affairs program hosted by political commentator Armstrong Williams that is typically aired by Sinclair-affiliated stations, and is intended to air in weekend late morning slots as a complement to the national networks' Sunday morning talk shows. However, The Right Side is often programmed in graveyard slots on most Sinclair stations who locally choose to instead fill the weekend morning slots with paid programming, weekend morning newscasts and local public affairs programming, or have no scheduling room due to network sports telecasts and mandated educational programming.With regards to educational programming in the United States, some stations attempt to bury mandated E/I programming in graveyard slots, though under current regulations by the Federal Communications Commission under the Children's Television Act of 1990, children's television series must air during times when children are awake. Current standards implemented by the FCC in July 2019 require that educational programs air at any time between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m.; however under the 2019 rules, individual stations have the option to place up to 13 hours of educational programs per quarter on a digital subchannel, or air up to 13 hours per quarter of specials or short-form content considered to be educational in concept.
Thus, these stations will "bury" E/I-compliant programs in the middle of a block of infomercials during the daytime hours, when most children are either at school or asleep or participating in youth sports, scouting or other activities, and are unlikely to ever see them, though a loophole allowing more advertising for shows targeted to teenage audiences means that most educational programming shown on American commercial broadcast television since the 2010s consists of generic documentary, game show, dramatic, or biographical programming unlikely to be of interest to most children, which in concert with the rule changes—which also eliminated mandates for subchannels to comply with the Children's Television Act —has resulted in further attrition of already low audience shares for educational programming on American television.