It wouldn't matter..
to anyone if TV manufactures allowed the old fashioned practice of letting the user choose what order the channels are displayed. Maybe some commenter here can point me to TV that allows this. And I don't mean a favorites list.
The organisation that manages the UK's digital terrestrial TV platform has revealed how it hopes to rejig the Freeview EPG Logical Channel Number (LCN) list to create space for more channels. And, for the first time, to incorporate IPTV services. DMOL (DTT Multiplex Operators Ltd) wants to make the EPG listing more easy to …
"the old fashioned practice of letting the user choose what order the channels are displayed"
You'll probably find there's some agreement somewhere that says that's not permitted. Otherwise how many people would ever see the shopping channels, let alone actually watch them or buy anything?
My oldish LCD Panasonic TV allows removing channels from the EPG. The channel is still viewable if you type in the channel number, but it is skipped when stepping up and down the channels.
It also allows 4 favorite lists that can contain any selection of the remaining channels in any order. Once the favorite list is selected, it stays selected between turning the TV off and on.
Even better the EPG can be displayed vertically for a single channel, rather than as a grid for all channels. Much easier to see what's on and program names are not truncated.
There are no ads or even a space for them in the EPG, the TV must pre-date that abomination.
Works great - I have about 16 decent channels left to view and never see any of the others - although even then there is often nothing worth watching.
In Germany there is no channel numbering scheme, so everyone numbers the channels themselves. It's fairly hard to sort 100+ channels over a bad rubbery remote.
The only useful implementation I've seen was on VDR, which uses plain text files to manage its channels.
What they really need to do is put all the BBC channels together, ITV channels together, C4 channels together, 5 channels together and so on. A +1 channel should be the channel after its on time version. The current 'design' where the channels are distributed at random throughout the guide makes no logical sense at all.
Hopefully, this means that the pay-to-view (remind me again why they called the platform FreeView, someone, please...) will also go into their own group? UK(g)OLD, for example, is still broadcast on this supposed FTA platform, along with SKYSport1, SKYSport2 and the (yet to 'broadcast') CONNECT group of channels...