One of my billionaire fantasies was to one day archive all of TV Guide and then use that to line up airing blocks for each decade at the start of every decade and then have it available as a streaming option.
Either way! Thank you so much for this!
Then, most of these are missing. Archive.org's collection is thread-bare. For most calendar dates they only have one, and which market it is for is just random (though, it favors the big ones... California, NYC/NJ, etc).
After that, each page of listings is just bad. It's not as easily OCRed as more traditional multi-column magazines. The listings often don't make mention of which episode is being re-run, title only quite often. This affects afternoon cartoons on UHF quite a bit, since they'd do alot of the short film Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker. You don't get any information on pre-emption at all. No sports-going-in-to-overtime or President-Reagan-has-an-important-announcement-about-the-commies. Daytime soaps can probably be pieced together just from the date (but that isn't perfect over long stretches and mixups accumulate, the NY Times lost track of their issue number and by the time they noticed they were off by 5000).
Hell, I wonder how many different edited-for-tv edits of movies there are, for at least a few there might be more than one because there's more reasons to do it than just bleeping out profanity.
It is pretty comprehensive and obviously it keeps the same market (NY). On your last point yeah the amazing thing is just how variable the length of movies are. Also just how many there were! Over 26 thousand unique films played on the 60ish channels in the New York Times in the 90s. Around 100 a day. Some films have like 40 votes on IMDb and played 20 times on television.
There is at least 100 different films from every year from 1931 to 1999 it looks like (obviously many more from the 80s and 90s). But even just considering that, that's 7K as an absolute minimum. With straight-to-video and TV films the 90s peaked with ~850 unique films from 1995 alone playing on television. And to just give an idea of the level of obscurity, the median IMDb vote count for 1995 is 500, so half are on the level of something like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122968/ (which yes, played 7 times, mostly on TMC in March of 1996). Also once you get very obscure things get all muddled. Like with https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112363/ which is marked as 1995 but certainly appears to have played once on television in 1991 so IMDb is wrong in this case. And of course there are a number of mistakes due to titles matching which I'm slowly correcting.
There are some caveats. This guy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0222755/, played 6 times, but on channel 41 (which at the time was Spanish language maybe?), so it has 0 votes on IMDb, but played 6 times on television, which is odd but not unheard of. But you do have to consider that this is using a slightly larger range of channels (some specific to the New York region, like CUNY and MSG) than one might expect. I would guess though that maybe 40% of films play on TCM, SHO, MAX, or HBO ultimately though. Most channels didn't play movies ever outside of primetime.
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