Suboptimal Scheduling Due to Rights Data Gaps

$50K-$200K lost ad revenue per quarter from inefficient programming. • Suboptimal schedules leave high-value political dayparts under-monetized or filled with content carrying unnecessary rights/royalty costs, while overuse of barter-heavy shows reduces available inventory for high-CPM political advertisers. This can easily burn through $25,000–$75,000 per political month per station in lost ad revenue and excess rights costs, and for a group with 10–20 outlets this scales to low- to mid-six figures per major election cycle.

Coordinator cross-checks syndicated program grids, traffic system logs, paper/e-mail contracts, and past schedules manually, then uses personal rules of thumb to decide which shows to run when, often tracking rights constraints and barter vs. cash tradeoffs in spreadsheets, sticky notes, and email threads instead of in an integrated rights-management and scheduling system. • Manual tracking in spreadsheets or email chains to approximate rights availability.