In the mountain time zone, some of our channels are the 'east' feed, and some are the 'west'. Some channels, we get both.
Nowadays, DirectTV has it mostly right in terms of the onscreen guide being right.
Back in the day, it was either '2 hours earlier than the east time' or .. like '3 hours AFTER the west time' or some other such tomfoolery.
Even now on some broadcast channels, times are listed as '[something]:00 eastern & central, [something-else]:00, pacific. and screw all of us in the Mountain time zone.
Per 2020 population statistics and from
this post in Quora:
- Eastern Time Zone - 154,892,174 (46.75% of the U.S. population)
- Central Time Zone - 95,774,455 (28.91% of the U.S. population)
- Pacific Time Zone - 55,503,963 (16.75% of the U.S. population)
- Mountain Time Zone - 23,001,711 (6.94% of the U.S. population)
- Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone - 1,413,013 (0.43% of the U.S. population)
- Alaska Time Zone - 733,676 (0.22% of the U.S. population)
Combined, that is ~75.66% of the United States population in the Eastern and Central Time Zone.
People kept wondering why ABC (when it had the rights from 1970 to 2005 instead of E$PN) started Monday Night Football at 9 PM Eastern instead of 8 PM Eastern, while other prime-time live coast-to-coast sports broadcasts were at 8:00 or 8:30 PM Eastern. Several key television markets, including (2002-2003 Television Rankings which is the oldest I have available):
2. Los Angeles (Pacific) - 4.987% of television households
5. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose (Pacific) - 2.284% of television households
12. Seattle-Tacoma (Pacific)
16. Phoenix (Mountain)
18. Denver (Mountain)
19. Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto (Pacific)
23. Portland, Oregon (Pacific)
26. San Diego (Pacific)
...were located in Pacific or Mountain Time Zones, and they needed an opportunity to get to a television set and watch the advertising. Seattle-Tacoma was
notorious for airing MNF on a one-hour tape delay unless the Seahawks were playing.
Also, wasn't the television announcements like "8 Eastern/Pacific, 7 Central" and we forgot about Mountain.