How does soap episode disturbution work and why where my AMC episodes delayed

[allmc2008]

I know that my AMC episodes where always a day behind because I am in the Dallas area, which is why mother use to tap into the Denver ABC station to watch the next days episode (This was in the early 90s so her friends thought she was psychic). Does anyone have an idea why my ABC station had a delay? Also, how does the distribution of soap episodes work.

[~bl~]

I have a question what time of day did the Dallas ABC air AMC? I know that when the ABC in Baltimore aired GH at noon instead of the national time of 3 pm, they were a day behind. In the 90s, the time the network sent out the feed influenced when a show would air, so if it didn't go in that slot, but earlier they would show the episode behind the rest. (Guiding Light was like this for years in some cities, but finally someone involved with the program was able to convince CBS to send the show to the affiliated stations in the morning so everyone in the country who got it at 10 AM eastern or later could see each episode on the same day.)

[BingCherry]

Usually it was because of either noon newscasts (especially on the central and mountain timezones; affiliates there would always be affected by that) or syndicated programming the stations found performed better in the timeslots than soaps. I remember reading an SOD from the early '90s where ABC said that a noon eastern/11am central feed for AMC was too cost-prohibitive.

[allmc2008]

11:00AM AMC

mid-day news.

1:00pm OLTL

2:00pm GH