Daybreak - the launch onwards

With reference to the first hour of daybreak, what do the US broadcasters do, do they begin at 6, or ?.
7 is the prime for most people I imagine, thus The Big Breakfast, RI:SE, and most commonly GMTV Today began at that time. I suppose in an ideal world, they may look at an hour filler, Daybreak 7 - 9, an Lorraine 9 - 10. Though of course that would push back Jezza Kyle, and in turn mean that This Morning wouldn't start until 11. Unless a half hour filler was used in the morning, with Jezza after the lunchtime news. I think I'm in to Saturday night loopy land!

Add to that Breakfast News used to start at 7am back in the day with Business Breakfast at 6am.

7. Local News can start as early as 4.30am though I think and runs until 7am

Which is strange because people here seem to believe the first hour is the strongest content-wise, with the newspaper review and such.

Isn't it also the bit that is most similar to Breakfast? I suspect that Daybreak are still getting GMTV-refugee audiences, who prefer the content that is most GMTV-like i.e. later (and may not be watching earlier)?

Probably also has something to do with Lorraine's show and people sticking ITV on waiting for that. I certainly think that is what the Daybreak bosses think as they seem to have increased the number of plugs for the show since it launched with just a brief mention. Lorraine first pops up a whole hour before her show now.

The content has nothing to do with the viewing figures at 6am, Daybreaks audience just simply arent awake. The 6am and 7am hours are more or less identical anyway.

They have about 300,000 viewers at 6am and about 1m at 7.30am. Is there really much point in doing the first hour when noone is watching and they don't show many adverts anyway? They might as well get 200,000 viewers with CITV but at a much lower output cost.

Well people like myself who have early starts and watch the 6am hour, I'm guessing wouldn't really like to sit there and watch 'Bob the Builder' so no I don't think that's how 'they can fix it!'

Using that logic, they should just leave the whole thing alone to not inconvenience the rest of the audience across the morning, just completely forget the fact it is lagging and most likely making a loss.

Would another option not be to splinter the show, so it ran 6-7am, 7-8:30, 8:30-9:25 (Lorraine)? Ratings wise that could make more sense, and as said the first hour is quite different to the latter 90 minutes. Clearly executives feel changing the slots makes sense for ratings, as isn't that why Sky moved everything to thirty minute slots on EPGs?

They could move back to having a Newshour... They could easily justify changing the EPG slots for that. It would serve people who are up at that time of the morning better. They've still got John anyway, they just need a suitable female presenter (I.e. not Tasmin).

Maybe a 'Newshour' would serve to poach some viewers from the BBC? They will no doubt have an 'Olympics Breakfast' next year which hard-news-watchers might switch away from, ITV could make their move then?

They could even just use Kate Garraway for such a move, but I do think the Newshour needs to come back in some form just to give the show some much needed gravitas. Daybreak in its current form would suddenly become a lot more acceptable. The Newshour has proven a huge loss because it has meant the loss of 'agenda setting' interviews, where politicians or other people would be interviewed and that would be splashed across the days media, ie loss of extra promotion.