Recently, Comcast Cable in central NJ changed its “channel lineup:” The same stations, but now on different channels. Why do the do this? It seems to me it serves absolutely no purpose for them and is an extreme hassle to customers already irate at their prices.
There are a few reasons for doing it. Sometimes, they want to better “organize” their channels, for example, putting all the music channels together. Other times, they want to try to sell more premium services. For example, back in the 1980s, one cable company found that by putting their premium channels smack in the middle of a block of popular standard channels, lots of people surfed over the encoded premium channels, wondered “Hmm, I wonder what those are?” and increased their sale of premium channels.
Other times it just means some new guy got promoted to “guy who figured out the order of the channels” and changed a bunch of stuff around to make him look important.
Official answer: By grouping channels, it makes it easier to offer groups to consumers who then can order only the groups they want. (Despite the fact that all the channels I want are spread into 5 different groups.)
I’ve also seen it happen when one cable company takes over other systems in the area and wants to have all the systems in the area set up the same way. But those days are mostly now over, they’re pretty much all local monopolies.
Real reason: the last part of friedos post.
It is just plain “screw over the customers for no useful purpose” thinking only. Ours once had TLC and Discovery adjacent. Made senes. Then seperated by 20 channels. (Moved one to be next to a Jazz channel and the shopping channels. ???) Then moved them back together.
Each time, I have to reprogram my VCR+.
Complete and total jerks.
The cable companies have the worst record in consumer service of any industry in history. This is one of the reasons why.
There is another reason: low channel positions are more valuable than high channel positions (*), and the cable company’s financial arrangements with the stations it’s carrying may be better optimized by an alternate channel arrangement.
(*) because most of us start channel surfing from the bottom and stop when we get to something that’s interests us. I like golf, and if ESPN2 is on a higher channel number than the Golf Channel I’m less likely to get to the ESPN2 channel. That means that ESPN might make a better deal with my cable company to get a lower position than the Golf Channel. Then again, the Golf Channel has the same incentive, so…