The cablevision station that serves Orange and Athol is moving its community channels.
Carol Courville, executive director of Athol-Orange Community Television Inc., a nonprofit cablecasting corporation, said recently that due to changes being made by Spectrum, viewers will have to find channels 1301 and 1302 to access the AOTV bulletin board and local programming.
Spectrum is transitioning to an all-digital service, and customers will no longer be able to access cable TV without a digital cable box. Spectrum customers are being notified that each television in the home will require a cable box.
“When they do the channel change in October, it will change AOTV’s channels,” said Courville. “We have been on channels 13 and 19 since our inception in 1995. Spectrum is coming in with all the other changes in requirement of the converter box with their encoding the digital signal.”
Channel 19, where viewers can listen to AOTV’s radio station WVAO 105.9 and view the bulletin board announcements for the community, will be on Channel 1302.
Courville said, “There are no other channels next to it. They’ve leveled the playing field, and done this out in the Berkshires, Pittsfield and Maine, moving all access channels to the upper spectrum of the channels.”
She said AOTV is planning to obtain a cable box and do a video to show people how to save the upper channels to their “favorites” channels.
“People are not going to surf from 13 all the way up to 1301,” she said.