cable lineup superfluousness

[Jon Delfin]

I've been looking over alternative cable TV plans lately, and looking at the channels menu, I see many of them have two locations in the list

there are theoretically numerical groups (the 200s are news channels, the 500s are HBO/SHO/etc.), but this is random; SyFy can be viewed on 17 and 111, IFC on 81 and 627

all duped channels are on the same tiers, so anybody whose package includes one of the channels can also access the other

other than upping the number of "channels offered" in their advertising, is there anything about this that matters to the viewer or to the cable company?

thanks

and merry/happy/other to all

jon

[Mark Jeffries]

The cable companies are still having separate SD and HD feeds for each channel. Comcast also has duplicate HD feeds (along with a few unduplicated channels, which aren't really of any interest for the most part--that includes the Byron Allen channels that they were forced to take) on their boxes.

Mark Jeffries
spotl...@gmail.com

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[Jim Ellwanger]

Going back around 25 years (I first had “digital cable” in 1998) -- the channels in the 2-99 range were the traditional “analog” cable channels, and the 3-digit channels were “digital,” which eventually became “HD.”

Many cable systems no longer transmit analog signals, but they duplicate the digital/HD channels in the 2-digit range so people don’t have to learn new channel numbers if they don’t want to (and, perhaps, due to carriage contracts that specify channel locations).

[Jon Delfin]

all of the channels I cited are HD, at least with my hardware and service tier

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[Jim Ellwanger]

Right - once upon a time, SyFy was only available on 17 in SD. Then they added it in HD on 111. Then they eliminated SD, but now duplicate SyFy in HD on both 17 and 111. That’s either so people won’t complain about having to remember a new channel number, or because their carriage contract with NBCUniversal says SyFy has to be in a specific channel range (or maybe both).

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