Breakfast Television

Breakfast television (Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and United Kingdom) or morning show (Canada and United States) is a type of infotainment television programme, which broadcasts live in the morning (typically scheduled between 6:00 and 10:00 a.m., or if it is a local programme, as early as 4:00 a.m.). Often hosted by a small team of hosts, these types of programs are typically targeted at the combined demographic of people getting ready for work and school, and stay-at-home adults and parents.

The first – and longest-running – national breakfast/morning show on television is Today, which set the tone for the genre and premiered on 14 January 1952, on NBC in the United States. For the next 60 years, Today was the #1 morning programme in the ratings for the vast majority of its run and since its start, many other television stations and networks around the world have followed NBC's lead, copying that programme's successful format.

Breakfast television programs are geared toward popular and demographic appeal. The first half of a morning programme is typically targeted at those preparing to commute to work with a focus on hard news segments; often featuring updates on major stories that occurred overnight or during the previous day, political news and interviews, reports on business and sport-related headlines, weather forecasts (either on a national or regional basis), and traffic reports (generally common with locally produced morning shows on terrestrial television stations serving more densely populated cities, though this has begun to filter down to smaller markets as traffic sensor networks have spread further into smaller communities). During the early morning hours (generally before 10:00 a.m. local time), local anchors will mention the current time – sometimes, along with the current temperature – in various spots during the newscast, while national anchors will mention the current time as "xx" minutes after the hour or before the hour; the time and/or temperature are also usually displayed within the station or programme's on-screen logo bug during most segments within the broadcast (most local stations originally displayed the current time and temperature only during their morning newscasts, though many began to extend this display within their logo bug to their midday and evening newscasts starting in the mid-1990s, starting in major markets and eventually expanding to stations in smaller markets). Especially with their universal expansion to cable news outlets in the early 2000s, many news-oriented morning shows also incorporate news tickers showing local, national and/or international headlines; weather forecasts; sport scores; and, in some jurisdictions where one operates, lottery numbers from the previous drawing day during the broadcast (although these may be shown during rolling news blocks or throughout the programming day on cable news outlets, some local stations that have utilized tickers solely for their morning shows have extended them to later newscasts, whereas others only display them during their morning news programs).

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