In north Jersey last night, some worked, some didn't.
The ones that didn't (mostly the higher ones, Rave, Game, etc) had a banner displayed that said either 'Service Unavailable' or 'Service Unauthorized' (I forget which, really).
So a signal is coming in - just seems like the channels are actually off.
(I have a SA8300 DVR - didn't try power-cycling it.)
Guys, here's the deal:
I believe if you get "not authorized" its cause you cable box might have lost its IP address. Naturally, your cable box needs to talk to the head-end to tell it to start streaming that VOOM channel on one of the available SDV slots.
Now the "Channel Temporarily Unavailable, Please try again later" is one that I see a LOT now, but in theory should NEVER see.
This means that they've ran out of SDV "slots" to send the channels in.
The idea of SDV is that the channels arent that popular, so they'll reserve, we'll say 8 channels worth of bandwidth, to broadcast 15 channels.
They figure that in any one head-end, no more than 8 out of those 15 channels will want to be watched by customers at the same time.
Problem is, if each of 15 houses wanted to watch a different Voom channel, only the first 8 houses tuning to their desired channel would get it. The other 7 would get "channel unavailable" since there's no bandwidth to broadcast it to you.
Now if you are house 16, and want to watch a channel that someone else already requested, then you are fine, the "slot" is reserved and the channel is already broadcasting.
Now tell me thats not messed up.?!?!??
Cablevision needs to re-evaluate the popularity of Voom, and assign it more SDV bandwidth.