Well I’ll make up some stuff and then I’ll also share my experience.
There are two separate things people use interchangeably that are distinct and different.
Channel Lineup
Channel Guide
When you do a scan it is in:
Settings>Channel Lineup>Your Channels
It’s using the antenna and tuner to get all available OTA signals it can. It then does whatever to include the FAST channels.
Click save and it is stored into a local database on your Tablo Gen4.
Then the Guide Update starts. It is a two phase process. The first runs very quickly to flag Your Channels (think check/uncheck) in the local database.
The second phase runs much longer as it is updating the information at the Mothership servers for the Guide Service. The servers have “points-of-presence” geographically dispersed nationally. Also 14 days of Guide data is stored locally in your device.
It is possible for channels to appear in Channel Lineup but not in the Channel Guide. The Channel Guide is zip code dependant. They use Gracenote metadata for that information. It also appears to be segregated by device app.
Demographic Market Area (DMA) is what everyone uses to determine who’s watching what.
That is why they are building the Guide Service to capture and harvest your brain. Or just eyes.
During one episode of downtime my Android mobile showed only 1 channel in the Guide while the LGTV app showed 53.
That is a recent “feature” introduced with the new Category Guide versus the Channel Guide views. All categories are at the channel level not at the show/program level.
I often have channels during Tropo/weather events which I can receive from hundreds of miles away. I have rescanned my Tablo Gen4 and those channels appeared both in the Channel Lineup and the Channel Guide. I never changed my zip code.
Since we’ve been having so much downtime lately I can’t do a rescan during a Tropo event. So I couldn’t prove that the new Category Guide is doing what I suspect that it is.
Perhaps one of you guys could. Check to see if there are channels in the Channel Lineup but not in the Channel Guide.
