Why, in this 24 hour world, do some television stations still go off the air late at night? I know of one (a FOX affiliate) that goes off at 4 a.m. and comes back on at 6a.m.! Why couldn’t they pop on an old movie or something for those 2 hours?
Money.
If you’d like to purchase that time to sell your butt-busting juicer I’ll bet they’d be glad to stay on the air and advertise it.
In the meantime it may be the only unsold time available for them to go off the air and let the engineers do transmitter maintence.
Actually, likely they could sell the air time. The question is whether or not they could sell it profitably. After all, how many people are up watching broadcast television at 3 am?
My brother works for a station in the Toledo market, doing, among other things the programming switches and cuts during the 11 pm to 7 am time slot on weekend nights. There are at least four people in the building at the time, all of whom are paid. There is continued use of electricity, etc. as a result. Having had an ex-wife who went through the process of converting a fast-food restaurant to 24-hour service, I can assure you that the expenses are greater than assumed, often resulting in losses rather than profits.
And while it is true that we are now more of a 24-hour culture, you have to keep in mind that there are oodles of 24-hour television channels available via cable and sattelite television, making it even less likely that viewers will be tuning in to a broadcast station in the wee hours. Decreased demand makes for decreased revenues, and I bet many stations just figure: lock it up and come back tomorrow. 