Why premium channels start films at odd times like 7:05
Most television runs on the hour and half hour, but premium movie channels happily start a film at 4:40 in the afternoon. The reason lies in how they earn money: with subscribers paying the bills instead of advertisers, there are no ad breaks to pad a schedule into neat slots.
Pay television, also called subscription or premium television, depends almost entirely on monthly fees from individual customers, whereas most multichannel broadcasters live on advertising and carriage fees. That single difference shapes nearly everything about it. A premium service has to keep offering programmes worth the price, both to win new customers and to stop existing ones from cancelling. In the United States the idea took off in the late 1970s and early 1980s as scrambled over-the-air signals that needed special equipment to unscramble.
Without commercials, films run uncut and without interruption, so the gaps between programmes stretch or shrink depending on when the last one ended. Schedules therefore drift into five-minute increments, with prime time the usual exception, when the flagship channel tends to start its film on the hour. The breaks that do exist are filled with trailers, interviews and behind-the-scenes pieces. Because such channels reach narrower audiences and face no sponsor pressure, their content rules are also looser.
Those looser rules and the need to justify a subscription pushed premium channels into expensive original drama. HBO's The Sopranos and Showtime's Homeland are among the series that won critical acclaim and awards, alongside comedy specials, concerts and documentaries. Many services also bundle a main channel with themed secondary ones, called multiplexes after cinema complexes, which usually cannot be bought on their own.
Sport has its own corner. HBO was long known for boxing and screened Wimbledon from 1975 to 1999. Specialist channels serve niche interests, such as cricket for American viewers, and seasonal out-of-market sports packages are typically the priciest option, at roughly 35 to 50 dollars a month, compared with under 10 to about 25 dollars for a typical premium suite.
Source: Pay television
