A Savvy Programmer

At the recent APT (American Public Television) Fall Marketplace, awards are given out to stations in different categories.

As a general rule, we don't win awards, since our market is not New York or even San Francisco. Those are the rating powerhouse cities.

This year, we really started to make some awesome changes, integrating Link TV's best programming into our schedule (shows like Borgen and Arab Labor). We also have put our best programming up on Sunday nights. As Bohdan (our programmer) says - counter strength with strength. We can't win against Downton Abbey, but we can definitely put a dent in the Sunday Primetime, week after week. Foyle's War, Father Brown, Inspector George Gentley, Vera, Rosemary and Thyme, Scott and Bailey and DCI Banks are some of the shows we rotate through those hours. Not all of these shows are distributed by APT, but some of them are. The remainder are BBC Worldwide. We also have a huge hit with the APT distributed show, Doc Martin. We have a total lock on Thursday's ratings, with this show and have for 5 years. Our viewers can't get enough.

All this means that we have 2 days a week that are awesome, Monday with New Tricks does well, Tuesday with Death in Paradise does well, too. Recently, we decided to go after the night of no ratings...Saturday. Instead of airing Pledge shows (which bring in some money, but do not get any ratings), we took the best of the week and we air them back to back. No money involved since the shows are within the 7 day rights window and amazingly, it has been a success for us.

I guess that APT took notice in our increased numbers, because we somehow won the Savvy Scheduler of the year award for Primetime!

A 54 percent increase in our ratings (of APT shows). We are still hurting with our ratings since we left PBS, but we are definitely moving up, rather than down.

Yay!