When your custom channel has no guide data, Channels will create airings for your channel. It will even create special titles, series IDs, and program IDs based on the time slot so that you can make a Series Pass for them.
By default it creates them with 1 hour durations. tvc-guide-placeholders: Duration of the placeholder.But you can control this yourself by providing their duration in seconds. You can set the value to 'false' to tell Channels to not make any placeholder airings at all.