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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.〔(Time Zones or Dayparting at mediaknowall.com )〕 Graveyard slots are usually in the early morning hours of each day, when most people are asleep. Because there is little likelihood of having a substantial viewing audience during this time period, 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 no one present at the local station overnight. A few stations use "we're always on" or a variant to position their 24-hour operation as a promotional selling point. ==Programming== 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 (between 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM). During this time slot, most people that are at home are asleep, and most of those that are awake are either at work, away from the television, or just returning home from a bar and too intoxicated to pay attention, leaving only insomniacs, intentionally nocturnal people, and irregular shift workers as 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 AM doubled from 1995 to 2010 (8% to 16%).〔(TV News for Early Risers (or Late-to-Bedders). Brian Stelter at nytimes.com, 31 Aug 2010. )〕 Since the advent of home video recording, some programs in this slot may be transmitted mainly with home taping in mind. Among these are the BBC's Sign Zone and their former specialist service BBC Select, which were for specialist audiences.〔(BBC access services: Get BSL programmes online )〕 Some channels may carry adult-oriented content in the graveyard slot, although programming of a pornographic nature is restricted to subscription channels in most countries because government communications regulations forbid pornography on over-the-air channels at any time of the day. The slot is used in the United States by some niche networks to transmit live sports such as cricket, Nippon Professional Baseball, Philippine Basketball Association matches, and Australian rules football from Australia, India, Japan, the Philippines, and other nations where the American overnight is the Asian afternoon and evening. Some limited prime-time or noontime general programming from those nations are also transmitted live to the United States. Since the 1980s, graveyard slots, 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; the graveyard slots can also be used as dumping grounds for government-mandated public affairs programming, or for station groups which are required by their parent companies to carry programming, to air those shows otherwise unpalatable in prime timeslots; for instance with Sinclair Broadcast Group, a public affairs program by political commentator Armstrong Williams (who has business interests with Sinclair), ''The Right Side'', is required to be aired by all Sinclair stations, but is often seen in graveyard slots on those stations instead of its intended weekend late morning slots as many Sinclair stations choose locally instead to present E/I and paid programming at that time. The most often seen original programming in the overnight period in the past was daytime talk shows which had failed to find an audience in their original timeslots and are being burned off, though with cable networks airing the same talk shows, usually a same-day late repeat of a successful talk show or infotainment news program is now carried; this is prevalent in markets with sports teams where coach's shows and team highlight shows preempt primetime infotainment shows before primetime, allowing it to be seen in some form on a station without penalty to the syndicator. The Big Three television networks in the United States all offer regular programming in the overnight slot (ABC and CBS use overnight newscasts, with an emphasis on sports scores from West Coast games that typically conclude after 1 AM ET and international financial markets with the ending of the Australasian and beginning of the European trading day, all of which takes place between 2 and 5 AM ET, and NBC, which dropped its overnight news in the late 1990s, replays the fourth hour of ''Today'' and CNBC's ''Mad Money''). Each network also produces its early morning newscast at 4 a.m. local time so that it may be tape delayed to air before local news. Also, since the proliferation of digital video recorders, several cable and satellite outlets have begun airing original or rarely seen archival programming in these time slots to make them available to those recording them on DVRs (special restrictions prevent stations from using the overnight graveyard slot for E/I shows). An emerging trend in the United States is an increasingly early local newscast, which now begins as early as 4:00 AM in some major markets, targeting those who work early shifts or are returning from late shifts; this early newscast would fit into the overnight daypart rather than breakfast television.〔 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 (a current day example is adult swim's ''FishCenter Live'', which features games projected onto the video image of an aquarium), 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. Another thing to note is 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 or ads for "mail-order bride" services, and public service announcements airing in this time slot due to the reduced importance of advertising revenue. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Graveyard slot」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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