*pokes American TV with curiosity*

[zahri_melitor]

I have questions. Your television does not make my kind of sense, but then I live in the nice world of 5 channels, plus digital miscellanary.

Firstly, how many channels do you actually have? Free to air ones?

Could anyone give me a link to a readable TV guide for a day that I could look at?

Does your evening TV really start and run on the hour?

Comments

[anka1082]

Adding to Julie's comments, I'm from the Eastern time zone.

Anyway, without cable you generally get crappy reception for most of the channels you get (even if you live in the city, which was the experience of my childhood, as we didn't get cable until after I went away to college, and we had local stations for all of the networks, I believe).
-ABC
-NBC
-CBS
-FOX
-PBS (as Julie said, they are public tv and run on donations. This means no product advertisements. There are show advertisements, though).

Also, we (sort-of) got a tiny network called PAX for a little bit, that had mostly religious-type programming, but it took the WB prime-time shows (their 8:00 and 9:00 hour-long shows) and showed them at 6:00 and 7:00 the evening after. This network has since disappeared.

In my pre-cable days, CBS and PBS were the two stations that could be counted on to come in with clear reception on a regular basis. The rest of them would flop around from being clear to being totally fuzzy. Weather made a difference, though not always the same difference.

Basic cable in and of itself doesn't add too many more networks, I don't think. Most people, when they get cable, they get basic extended cable, which adds more channels (at least, that's how cable is in Michigan).

More on prime-time and time zones as far as know (as I said, I'm Eastern, so I know for sure how that works, as well as Central, but my Mountain and Pacific are based on vacations spent out there, so I make no promises for actual validity). Eastern and Pacific are the east and west coast time zones, and their prime-time starts at 8:00. Central gets things aired at the same moment as Eastern (they are an hour behind Eastern, so their prime-time starts at 7:00, because that's 8:00 Eastern time). Mountain time is one hour ahead of Pacific, and I think that they mostly follow the same sort of relationship Central and Eastern have. Except that since Mountain is an hour ahead, then their prime-time would start at 9:00. I think that there is more flexibility in Mountain time, though, but I'm not sure.

So, for example, Gilmore Girls is on at 8:00 on Tuesdays. This means in Central time it is on at 7:00. In Pacific time it is on at 8:00 as well, and in Mountain time it would be on at 9:00. Now, I've heard that the default timezone for satellite tv companies is Eastern, but I've no idea if that's true or not.

Ads for tv shows where they say times often include the phrase "at 8/7 central."