STATIONS SEEN ON THEIR CORRECT CABLE CHANNEL (EXAMPLE: CHANNEL 5 ON CHANNEL 5)

[fybush]

At least in my travels, I haven't seen much evidence that 2009 and the end of OTA analog resulted in very many cable lineup changes.

I would submit that the bigger motivation for cable lineup changes in recent years has been regulatory, not technical - specifically, the provision in the must-carry rules that went into effect sometime in the late 1990s/early 2000s (can't quite put a finger on it at the moment) that must-carry stations have to be carried on their OTA channel position or lower. That provision appears to me to have been responsible for some of the moves (Syracuse, suburban Boston) from off-channel to on-channel positions.

And of course by 2009, most larger cable systems were looking toward an all-digital future, with a significant majority of their customers (the valuable ones, anyway) watching on digital boxes that were probably already remapping SD QAM channels in place of the legacy analog lineup.

(I know that my S-A box for Time Warner doesn't tune analog at all - if I punch in "10" for my local NBC affiliate, it's tuning a QAM stream at 93.xx instead of the analog 10 signal on the cable.)

 

[vchimpanzee]

Charlotte, NC had only a few VHF stations in the analog era. On Time Warner where I live, WBTV channel 3 (CBS) is on 3 and WSOC-TV channel 9 (ABC) is on 9.

Ironically, the NBC station was known as NBC 6 for many years, and shortly before their over-the-air channel changed from 36 with the switch to digital, they started calling themselves News Channel 36.

With the digital transition I had to learn a whole new set of channel numbers. My TV 12 made it easy by not mentioning their over-the-air number as they once did as WB 55.