If you’re a Comcast Cable subscriber in Southwest Florida, you may have noticed a new trick that they’re pulling on you.
When you turn your converter box off, it conveniently resets the channel to channel 8, a local cable station that is an affiliate of their MyTV network. When you turn the box back on, it doesn’t go to the channel you were last watching, it now goes to channel 8.
Why are they doing this? Well to increase viewership of their own channel, of course. And more viewership means better ratings, higher potential advertising dollars, etc., etc.
Other stations in that local market have begun to question Comcast’s practice of resetting the channel, as it could potentially affect their standings in the ratings.
Steve Pontius of the local NBC affiliate told the News-Press that for now, “it appears to be more of a nuisance than an actual ratings infringement. But anything that is a nuisance to my viewers is a nuisance to me.”
Sure seems like it could skew the ratings to us. If we leave our TV on one channel when we shut it off, we sure expect it to stay there when we come back.
Now watching TV in that part of Florida will become as annoying as watching TV in a hotel… don’t you hate it when the TV reverts back to the hotel’s own programming when you shut it off? What a nuisance to have that happening in your own home.
Anyone else have a similar experience with Comcast or another cable or satellite provider? Leave a comment and let us know.
5 comments ↓
Here in Albany, NY, we have Time Warner. They have a button on their remote for their local channel, Channel 9, but no automatic redirect to it when I shut my box off.
I hate it too when I’m staying in a hotel and I watch one channel at night, and then turn it back on in the morning and it’s on the stupid hotel’s channel.
No I don’t think Time Warner has stooped to this yet, at least not in my market. This is an annoyance at best, and perhaps ratings manipulation at worst… shame on Comcast.
This is generally a setting in the box, not a command from “home base”. On my box for example, I can set it come on to a predetermined channel, the last channel watched, channel 1 or Comcast8…….
I subscribe to Comcast in the Memphis area. When we first got our box, the box would reset to Channel 1 upon turning the TV on, which was their informational channel. This channel was nothing more than informational slides, the sound was silence. The info included new channels that were added, rate increases and special community events. To be honest, I liked having that info available, although I would have enjoyed returning to my last viewed channel even more.
Last month, Comcast changed that for the worse! Channel 1 is now a Pay-Per-View movie channel (as if they don’t already have a multitude of them on other channels)! Every time I turn the TV on, I am bombarded with obnoxious movie trailers. They totally dropped the informational channel. It has annoyed me so much that I am seriously considering switching to satellite.
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