However, I believe that a great deal of that time comes from the ST
opening and closing credits, which are longer than ours. Just count the "dry
time," meaning program content ONLY, minus opening title/credit sequences and
end credits. And there's never any variance in the length of our show unless
someone at your end of the signal is making trims here and there; the length
of each episode is always *exactly* the same, right down to the frame-count.
So there's *no way* you can be seeing a 30-second variance between episodes.
When it leaves our hands, all of the episodes are *exactly* the same length.
I know because I'm part of the final edit, and we have to hit exactly the same
count every time.

It's altogether possible that your station is either trimming scenes or
running the show through a compression system.

jms