This suggestion is directed toward MediacomChad and Bainch, for forwarding up through chain of command within Mediacom.
I just returned from a weekend visiting my wife, who has temporary work three and a half hours away in a community served by a local telephone/TV cooperative providing triple-play services for telephone, television, and internet to a three-county area in Wisconsin. Inside communities, this cooperative uses cable technology along with both legacy copper telephone and IP phone, and out in the rural areas, everything has been upgraded to provide DSL-based IPTV and high-speed internet over copper.
What impressed me this weekend, after replacing an older analog TV previous fed by a DTA with a new model HDTV at the place where my wife is staying, was that I discovered that the coop is making full use of virtual channel information within its OpenQAM Basic and Extended Basic TV packages. After a channel scan, we discovered that one could select channels by the very same channel numbers as found on the DTA or other set-top-boxes on the same system. Instead of Mediacom's 52-1, 52-3, 52-5, 97-3, 97-5, 114-1, 114-2, etc., on their system, one found analog channel 2, followed by SD digital 2-2, followed by HD digital 2-3, all with different versions of the same channel, then analog channel 3, SD 3-3, and HD digital 3-4, etc, right up through digital SD channel 93-93. Virtual channels (which is a built-in coding feature to OpenQAM) put everything right in order, with SD and HD versions right next to each other for the locals, and all in the same order regardless of TV used and with or without a STB.
To me this is a no-brainer of a feature already built to cable standards that Mediacom should be making much greater use than they already are. It can't be that hard to implement (its probably already built into the channel modulators already being used), as it is really your modern HD TV doing the work of sorting the signals into the order presented based on extra bits in the digital signal.
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