WOW Redemption -- and Channel Reassignments

WOW (Wide Open West) has taken a big step on behalf of its customers following the reactions to their announcement of an upcoming switchover, from analog to digital transmission for basic cable (documented from my point of view in the previous post). Originally, WOW's position was that their contracts with content providers required them to encrypt any digital signal, even the previously unencrypted previously analog signals. Now, according to the WOW Buzz! blog (now defunct), the WOW executive team has decided that the digital basic cable channels will be unencrypted, meaning that viewers with digital TVs or DVRs will be able to tune in the basic cable channels without being required to rent a WOW set-top box in perpetuity, and preserving their devices' capability to switch channels automatically. This turnabout made me almost giddy, and it's a commentary on our times that an example of a large company working on behalf of its customers makes my head spin. Thank you, WOW! My DVR will be even more capable than before the cutover, rather than much less capable.

Here's a picture of our DVR tuned into one of the first batch of channels switched to digital, Animal Planet.

If you click on the photo, you will find near the top the channel display of the DVR, showing 112.10. This is the 'true' channel, the frequency the DVR is tuned to. What WOW uses to communicate with its customers are what I call the 'marketing channels,' which are the channels that WOW publishes in guides and that the WOW-supplied DTAs, DVRs, and set-top boxes understand (and translate into the true frequency). For example, the basic cable channels all have marketing channels below 99, and no decimal points. One tier of HD channels is all in the 200s. Animal Planet is WOW channel 54, true channel 112.10.

The group of customers benefiting from this change -- those with digital equipment but no WOW boxes -- must necessarily work with the true frequencies and not the marketing channels. We do this by using the 'scan' feature of the devices, which discover which frequencies carry a valid signal. You then flip through the discovered channels, identifying which content (ABC, Animal Planet, etc.) is on which true channel. Keep a pencil handy. (A starting point is in the Buzz blog post mentioned above, but different devices may identify the number after the decimal point differently.)

However, we are obliged to be diligent. This Saturday (April 9) we turned our DVR to the ABC 'true frequency', 71.1, to discover only the message, 'Scramble Program'.

We did a channel scan (no small task with the abundance of digital channels; our DVR needs least 20 minutes), and what had happened was this: the three unencrypted channels that had been in the 71 block (ABC on 71.1, Fox on 71.2, and PPVP on 71.5) had been flipped overnight to 72.1, 82.2, and 75.6, respectively. Because the change was to true frequencies and not the WOW marketing channels, WOW did not announce or warn about it. Granted, for many or most customers -- those using WOW boxes -- the change is invisible because they never see the true frequencies, just the marketing channels. Still, I would like to suggest an opt-in email list for those of us that don't want to miss recording a show on our DVRs because WOW has stealthily shuffled the content somewhere else.