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Darshan comes before the first food of the day; chauvihar ends eating at sunset; devasi pratikraman begins just after. That means the evening slot moves through the year and moves by city — a fixed 7pm schedule is wrong in Ahmedabad in December and wrong in London in June. Scheduled live events and the playout grid have to be re-pegged to sunset, and stated in the guide as "after sunset" rather than as a number.

Ascetics stay put through the monsoon months and give pravachan daily; then they resume vihar on foot and the daily recording simply stops. A channel built on chaturmas recording lives this cliff. The four months produce the year's recording, and the remaining eight are served entirely out of the archive — which is the actual reason a 24x7 linear channel and a well-catalogued back library are not optional here.

These are consecutive, not concurrent, and that is the scheduling fact that matters. Shvetambar Paryushan runs eight days and concludes on Samvatsari, on Bhadrapada Shukla 4 or 5; Digambar Das Lakshan Parva begins on Bhadrapada Shukla Panchami and runs ten days to Ananta Chaturdashi, the two windows abutting or overlapping by a day at the seam. A channel serving both sects is planning for roughly eighteen contiguous days of peak load with two separate climaxes, and has to time its promotion twice — the Digambar half starts when the Shvetambar half is finishing. Inside the Shvetambar days: the Kalpsutra vachan days, the swapna darshan, the tapasvis being honoured, and then Samvatsari, with khamatkhamna and Michhami Dukkadam going around every family. At the Digambar end, the ten dharmas day by day, and Kshamavani in the idiom of Uttam Kshama. Shops shut, viewing is all-day rather than evening, and the household watches together on the TV. The week after the second climax, it falls off a shelf, and that is normal, not a failure.

Nine days each in Chaitra and Ashwin, one bland meal a day, Navpad and the Siddhachakra at the centre. It is a quieter, more disciplined nine days than Paryushan — the same people return at the same hour on each of the nine days, working through a fixed sequence. It behaves more like a series than anything else in the Jain year and should be published as a numbered nine-part series, not as loose videos.

Mahavir Janma Kalyanak in Chaitra; Diwali night for the nirvana and the next morning for Gautam Swami's kevalgyan and Bestu Varsh; Gyan Panchami when the manuscripts and books are laid out and honoured; Kartik Purnima when the Palitana yatra reopens after chaturmas; Maun Ekadashi kept in silence; Akshaya Tritiya for the varshitap parna. These recur, so the archive can be programmed against them — last year's Gyan Panchami lecture is the right thing to schedule this Gyan Panchami.

Sunday pathshala, a monthly bhakti-bhavna or swadhyay evening at the community hall, and samayik whenever someone can hold the forty-eight minutes. This is a calendar of volunteers and school runs rather than of monsoon, and it wants short numbered episodes landing before the Sunday class, so whichever parent takes the hour can build it around the episode the children have already watched.

A pratishtha or anjanshalaka, a diksha season in a family, the Mahamastakabhisheka at Shravanabelagola that comes once in twelve years. Treat these as the peak-load case: they are announced with little lead time and they do not come back. A pratishtha will not pause while you test an encoder, so run the live path end to end on an ordinary dusk aarti — which happens anyway — and keep it exercised, so the path is already proven on the day the anjanshalaka date is announced.

Community permission to record a pravachan comes from the trust or sangh that hosted the chaturmas and from the ascetic — not from you. Legal rights in the footage are a separate question and are not settled by that permission: under Indian copyright law the producer of a cinematograph film is ordinarily the first owner absent a written agreement to the contrary, so the videographer holding the tapes may hold rights the trust cannot sign away. Settle both in writing before you spend money digitising an archive — the sangh's permission on one side, a written assignment or licence from whoever actually recorded the material on the other — and take proper legal advice on an old tape library rather than acting on a verbal say-so. On the permission side the grant is narrow and it moves: there are ascetics who permit audio but not video, ascetics who permit recording but not live transmission, and ascetics who permit nothing; it is usually per-chaturmas, often verbal, and can be withdrawn, so be prepared to pull a series. And once a clip of a monk or nun is public, assume it will be re-cut and re-captioned somewhere you do not control. Watermarking, signed playback URLs and geo-fencing reduce casual lifting and let you honour a permission that was given only for one region; none of it stops a phone pointed at a screen, so the relationship with the trust is the real protection. Read the content policy of every store you intend to ship the white-label apps on before committing to Digambar muni footage in them — that review is done by people outside the community.

Shvetambar Murtipujak, Sthanakvasi, Shvetambar Terapanth and Digambar (which has a Terapanth of its own) do not want a shared front page, and content that serves one can be actively wrong for another. Tradition has to drive the category structure and sit in every title's metadata, not be buried in a description, and each household's library has to be built out of its own categories and series rather than filtered out of someone else's. Trying to be the channel for all of them with one undifferentiated library is how you end up serving none of them.

Archives arrive as tape, disc and loose MP4 files of uneven age and uneven care: one mic on a lectern, a camera at the back of a hall, ceiling fans, children, and a loudspeaker echo off the pat. Bulk import will get the files and the metadata in; it will not make the Gujarati intelligible, and the subtitle track for a Prakrit sutra has to be typed by someone who knows the text. Budget a person who has both the language and the sutras to sit and listen through the archive hour by hour, and accept that some tapes are only worth keeping as audio.

A single session may quote a sutra in Ardhamagadhi or Sanskrit, expound it in Gujarati, and drop into Hindi or Marwari for a story — and in the south, the whole thing is in Kannada. Subtitling needs the verse transliterated rather than translated, with the gloss kept separate from the ascetic's own aside, and it needs a person who knows the terms. Do not machine-translate scripture; a wrong rendering of a sutra is not a typo to this audience.

The camera is usually a young man from the sangh doing it as seva, and he disappears when his exams or his shop demand it. What has to survive him is a camera position the trustees have already agreed — back from the pat, never close on an ascetic's face — written down along with the pravachan hour and the mic placement, and that is worth more than better equipment. Plan the year knowing that production capacity exists for the chaturmas months and that editorial capacity — cataloguing, subtitling, scheduling the archive against the calendar — is what you are paying for the rest of the year.

Santhara, disputes over the status of pilgrimage sites, and fundraising appeals attract attention from outside the community and argument inside it. Decide in advance what the channel carries and who approves it, and put that in writing with the trustees before the first upload. A trust that says nothing publicly while a santhara is being argued over is exercising a restraint that is common and deliberate, and a legitimate position rather than a failure of nerve; a channel that has promised the community somewhere for that argument to land has taken on work nobody agreed to staff.