If you live in Fairfield County, there’s more confusion ahead in finding your favorite hometown government and educational cable channels on Optimum cable.
Just a week after moving the locally produced stations from Channels 79 (government) and 78 (educational), Optimum has decided to move them back by Sept. 16.
— an announcement from the Area Nine Cable Council
On Aug. 21, Channel 79 and Channel 78 were moved up the dial to Channels 1310 and 1305 respectively.
Among the community stations in Connecticut to be affected are the educational and government channels in Greenwich, Stamford, Darien, Norwalk, Westport, Easton, Redding, New Canaan, Weston and Wilton.
Image from DarienTV
The new name for Darien government’s cable TV channel won’t be changing back..
“While we are pleased that our objections and protest letters from local government official were heard, this action will unfortunately add to confusion” said Hal Levy, chairman of the Area Nine Cable Council (A9CC), a state-created body that advocates for community cable TV.
“As with the shuffling done last week, Optimum’s parent company Altice did not ask our advice — they just did it.”, said Levy. “All of this mess could have been avoided with better planning and communications between Optimum and our member stations, and we have responded with some suggestions to mitigate the confusion.”
Image from DarienTV79
Old logo. DarienTV won’t be on Channel 79 as of Thursday, Aug. 21.
“The original switch caused us a great deal of work in rebranding our station from Darien TV79 to just DarienTV. We also did a major education effort to tell our viewers of the switch. Now we have to undo all of those efforts.” said A9CC Vice Chairman Jim Cameron, program director of DarienTV, that town’s government channel.
“Still, we’ve decided to stay with our new name as our programming streams not only on cable but also on YouTube and Twitter.” he added.
Other town stations are happy with the decision to go back to the old channels — even while Optimum says (in a letter to PURA, the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority) that they may “revisit channel positioning at a future date.”
Darienite.com’s past articles on the local channel reshuffling:
• Optimum Completes Channel Switching for Local Cable Stations in Southwest Fairfield County (Aug. 21)
• Optimum is Changing Cable TV Channels: DarienTV79 Soon Won’t Be on Channel 79; Channel 78 Also Moving (Aug. 12)