Entertainment Tonight/At a Glance

Basic Information

• Full Name: Entertainment Tonight
• Premiere Date: September 14, 1981
• Finale Date: still airing
• Syndicated: (1981-present)
• Major Market Network: CBS
• Major Market Airtimes: Weeknights at 7:30PM (1x01 through present); Saturdays at 7PM

International Viewings

Preceding the localized version the show is shown in Canada on Global from 7PM. In the South Pacific, Ten airs the show from 2:30PM in Australia and MediaWorks aired the show from 4PM for New Zealand before 2020. In the Middle East, the Middle East Broadcasting Center airs the show at 2:30 PM with Big CBS Prime airing the show for India.

Episode Structure

Each weekday episode is split into four segments for commercial advertising having respective durations (in minutes) of 10, 3, 7 and 2. There is also a 10 second program separator for local stations to use as a commercial filler spot. This separator usually feature a short news clip or a brief clip on celebrity birthdays. Also the last segment that has the closing credits is pre-rolled with a social media question of the day. These provided clips and question are never used in international broadcasts and are completely optional in North American broadcasts. Promos are pre-rolled before the episode with a segment timing slate at the end, which can be followed by specially requested local station promos.

The weekend edition has a longer running time of 40 minutes (excluding national/local advertising spots) and is a mix of extended stories from the last week and occasionally themed archive specials (such as in May 1994 when Star Trek: The Next Generation ended). It is produced toward the end of the week and fed to stations on Saturday US Pacific Time. The days promos are inserted (after the national advertising spots) between the weekend edition's seven segments.

Distribution Details

First daily feed

• Domestic US 1080i60 station feed via Galaxy 28 at 4.06 GHz horizontal 29.86 MBd 8PSK 3/4

• Domestic US 480i60 center-cut station feed via Galaxy 28 at 3.98 GHz horizontal 32.36 MBd QPSK 3/4

• International 576i25 anamorphic fibre feed

• South Pacific (prior to 2013) 576i center-cut international feed via Intelsat 5 at 4.16 GHz horizontal 26.48 MBd QPSK 3/4

Various versions and promos are fed between 1530 and 2000 East Coast Time. With the South Pacific relayed feed having irregular start and end times, also the international feed is PowerVu encrypted for one hour of that time.

Captioning

The show's closed captioning is produced in-house by VITAC staff and provided to stations in DVB-VBI EIA-608 format for insertion into their play-out system. Most international stations that use Teletext either lack the capability for conversion or get a 625 line version that has had the DVB-VBI stripped out by a third party network operator. Australian broadcasters re-caption the show in real time. The original captions are funded (as with most US shows) by a national advertising spot that appears toward the end of the show that has a captioned voice-over bumper before announcing "closed captions provided by".

As of January, 2013, Red Bee Media who provide the Australian captions are now converting the DVB-VBI EIA-608 format to an EBU STL file which is converted to Teletext on play-out as they do with other non-live US shows. They also reformat the captions to lowercase and colorize the different speakers.

Trivia

The show aired its 10,000th episode on August 22, 2013. The Celebrity Birthday segment presented at the show's end was discontinued for the weekday shows during the 34th season and then was revived for the 39th season.