Jamie Fraser on Starz: TV blocking. Help me not blow up my tv.
April 4, 2015 4:57 PM   Subscribe

TV/Cable filter: New LG HDTV, can't get to higher channels, need to access a free preview weekend of Starz, which is in the triple digits for my cable company. Manual is pointless, customer support of both cable company and LG offline for the weekend, googling has been futile: help me access channel 463 by 9pm tonight?

I have an LG 32LB5600. I need to access channel 463 (Starz), which my cable company says is supposedly part of a free preview weekend. When I type said channel in, my tv thinks I mean channel 46-3. I've tried auto-tuning for new channels, but no dice - nothing over the 130s appears. Manual tuning doesn't work, as the menus available to me don't let me type in new channels, but only manipulate channels that it's already found via auto-tuning (i.e. I can delete channels it found, but can't add ones it didn't. have played with this ad nauseum, but can't get a different result). The manual for my tv is less than helpful: it claims I should be able to get a keypad, when manually tuning, that would let me add a new channel in that the tv hasn't found, but in practice I don't get a keypad so I can't add any channels.

I can't believe I'm blowing a question on this, but: help? Jamie Fraser is on that channel at 9 and oh dear holy heaven would I like to see him at 9....
posted by AthenaPolias to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (8 answers total)
 
You may very likely have to go to the cable companies office/store and get one of their real dedicated cable boxes. temp auth stuff like this is a huge headache.
posted by emptythought at 5:05 PM on April 4, 2015


Unfortunately, I don't think you're going to be able to do this with the TV alone. I checked the specifications in the manual for that model and found this on pg 22:

Program Coverage: VHF 2-13, UHF 14-69, DTV 2-69, CATV 1-135, CADTV 1-135

It looks like the TV tuner will handle channels up to 135 by itself, but going beyond that requires a cable box. :-(
posted by malthusan at 5:16 PM on April 4, 2015


If you can't get it hooked up, you can buy the season on iTunes for $23. They'll give you all the episodes that have been aired so far, and then you can download the forthcoming episodes a day or two after they air.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:49 PM on April 4, 2015


For what it's worth, I have DirecTV, I was told about this free offer, I can tune channels through 1000 and still it won't appear.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:12 PM on April 4, 2015


It sounds like you have an analog cable plan from your cable company, and you need a digital cable plan (with the appropriate digital cable box) in order to receive channel 463. Analog cable on TVs just doesn't go up to 463 - that's a job for an external cable box or Cablecard device like a TiVo.

(There is a small possibility that your cable company also allows you to access some digital channels via a direct cable hookup to an HDTV, but not only is this increasingly rare as it is no longer a legal requirement for the cable companies, it has almost never been used for anything beyond local stations and maybe C-SPAN if you're lucky. That's why your TV doesn't appear to support a channel 463.)

If you had a cable box but thought you could get rid of it with your new HDTV, plug it back in and check to see if it gives you access. Otherwise, now is a time to call in a favor with a friend who subscribes to digital cable.
posted by eschatfische at 7:54 PM on April 4, 2015


Maybe I mis-read it but I thought the free STARZ was for April 10. Maybe I did not read it correctly.
posted by JayRwv at 8:00 PM on April 4, 2015


All cable is essentially digital at this point but most TVs have a limited "QAM" tuner to handle cable signals that only tunes into channels your provider has decided to let you access without a box, with mixed results and weird random resolutions. They won't tune past the 100s by design, unfortunately.
posted by aydeejones at 8:56 PM on April 4, 2015


When I last had a cable plan, most of the channels were available without the box, but they were given essentially random numbers like 117-4 — even for over-the-air local channels. One of things the cable company's box will do is renumber the channels to more human-intelligible numbers like 463. I had to autotune and go through everything to figure out where the channels I wanted to see were actually located. At some point the law changed as eschatfische mentioned, and they started scrambling everything except the local channels so you had to use their box to watch anything on a cable channel. I would be surprised if a limited-time preview channel was unscrambled so you didn't need the box, even if you could figure out what channel it was mapped to.
posted by stopgap at 9:23 PM on April 4, 2015


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