Graveyard slot

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. The most well-known graveyard slot in most parts of the world is the overnight slot, the daypart bridging the late night and breakfast television/early morning slots (between 2:00 and 6:00 a.m.). During this time slot, most people are either asleep or working overnight shifts (in some cases, doing so without access to a television set). Because of the small number of people awake at these times, 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 a.m. doubled from 1995 to 2010 (8% to 16%); this research coincided with the expansion of early morning newscasts by many local stations during this period. The Big Three television networks in the United States all offer regular programming in the overnight slot.