KCM welcomes volunteer community producers who submit single programs for air on the channel and other producers who provide multiple episodes of regular series. Twice a year, air time slots are randomly assigned to producers of regular series who have met the minimum requirements pertaining to the number of episodes that must be submitted in order to maintain a regular time slot.
Two different schedules are created for the first and second half of the year (Jan – Jun & Jul – Dec) for 2 important reasons:
- to be fair to everyone
- to help everyone reach a wider audience.
Time slots are randomly assigned within each of these schedules around other fixed time frames (regular government meetings, live programs, etc.).
Regular time slots are only awarded to Community Producers who commit to providing new programs on a regular basis. For regular weekly shows, it is expected that a new program will be created for each week. Most producers create and submit 4 episodes at a time to stay ahead of scheduling deadlines. The minimum requirement to maintain a regular weekly time slot is to maintain an average of 2 new episodes per month.
Producers should not assume that time slots traditionally associated with “prime time” on commercial television are equally desirable on community television. In fact, prime time on commercial television may actually be considered less desirable because of competition. With DVRs that can be set to automatically record TV programs, no time slot is a “bad” time slot as long as producers do a good job of communicating information about their time slot to their constituents.
New regular series that begin after the program schedules have been created and other non-series programs are awarded time slots at the discretion of the KCM based upon program length and availability.