Talk:Episodes, films, and shorts/@comment-5288784-20150305235303/@comment-5288784-20150306004045

Okay, let me explain how time zones work. Simplifying it a lot: Earth is divided (more or less) into 24 time zones. Generally, neighbouring time zones are separated 1 hour from each other. When you go from one time zone to another, you are moving your clock forward or backward. All of this is made to accommodate as closely as possible to the time of the day shown as the position of the sun in the sky (so the top position of the sun in the sky would be roughly 12am everywhere).

Typically, smaller nations will stick to a single time zone for easier functioning. However, the United States, even after exclusion of Alaska and Hawaii, is so huge that it needs 4 time zones with 4 different times. When it is 4am in Los Angeles, it is already 7am in New York.

And this is what I read: in order to reduce such discrepancies in airing time (the networks might want to air some programs in the prime time, for example), they will deliberately air them later for western zones. So, with 11/10c airing time, New Yorkers will watch it at 11am, but those in Los Angeles will wait 3 hours until it's 11am on their clocks. As I read it, central time zone (west of east time zone and east of mountain time zone) traditionally air stuff at the same time as eastern time zone, but their clocks display one hour earlier (10am in this example).

The Hub didn't do that and showed everything at the same time everywhere, but they announced their airing times as for example 10am Eastern/7am Pacific. It made sense for easier calculations (adding or substracting one hour if you live in central or mountain zone is trivial). If Discovery Family really intends to show it at the same time everywhere, they would only make calculations harder for Pacific time (and even more for Alaska and Hawaii, if they get this channel over there). Mentioning only two most eastern time zones makes most sense with programs that are appropriately delayed by location due to timezones.