Graveyard slot

A graveyard slot (or death 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.^[1] 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 (e.g. software and technology upgrades) 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.