Spanish television schedules face increasing programming delays

Television programming schedules in Spain are becoming increasingly flexible, leading to significant discrepancies between official guides and actual broadcast times. Last-minute adjustments, extended program durations, and strategic scheduling to protect specific content have caused delays of twenty to thirty minutes in some instances.

On the channel La 1, programs such as ‘Valle Salvaje’, ‘La Promesa’, and ‘Malas lenguas’ have experienced cascading delays due to the expanded airtime of ‘Directo al grano’. Similarly, prime time slots on major networks are shifting later; during the first week of the 2026/2027 season, weekday prime time programming began on average at 23:17. Antena 3 also demonstrates this trend, where the duration of ‘El Hormiguero’ frequently dictates the start time of subsequent shows, sometimes pushing them past 23:40.