Overlapping Commercials on Cable TV

millardgroups@gmail.com · science forum beginner Joined: 20 May 2006 Posts: 3

Can someone please help me with a calulation that I can't figure out? I
need to calculate the odds that commercial breaks will overlap on cable
TV.

Here's the situation.... cable TV networks offer local commercial time
to cable operators. The local operators get two minutes every hour.

Commercial ad inserters that can playback from one to five commercials
at a time. These systems can monitor eight channels.

Given that:

There are eight networks being monitored
There is one local break each hour on each network
Each local break lasts 120 seconds
You can only start inserting ads at the beginning of the 120
seconds (no joining in progress)

What percentage of local commercial breaks will I be able to cover
if I have:

-- One MPEG card
-- Two MPEG cards
-- Three MPEG cards
-- Four MPEG cards
-- Five MPEG cards

I've tried to calculate this myself, but my statistics days are far
back in college... I just don't trust my results.

Thanks!

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