Since you brought this up it’s probably a good time to let you know that we are working on a project to address what we refer to internally as “The Buffalo Triangle Problem”. Where users reported that not only could they receive channels from their home DMA, but also found success receiving signals from Toronto, Rochester, and Erie.
Regardless of the name, the phenomenon is not unique to users in Buffalo, NY, users all over the globe live in Goldilocks zones that allow them to pick up signals from outside of their primary market. With TiVo we spent months and month (and months) requesting that they add these distant stations to hundreds of different lineups, to the point that it almost became someone’s full time job. This time around we need to take a different approach, which will come in the form of multi-lineup support.
During tuner setup you’ll enter in your home postal code as you naturally would. Plex will make it’s best effort to match the tuner channels to guide channels, as it does today, and you’re all set. However, if you have unmatched channels from distant markets that your tuner receives but your lineup does not account for you’ll be able to enter in a second (or third?!) postal code to retrieve additional lineups to match against. Not only will this allow you to resolve for this use case, but you’ll also be able to get more creative with your installations, like point two directional antennas in two different directions, connect them to two different tuners, and apply unique postal codes to each. Similarly users that might have both a CableCARD tuner and an OTA tuner will no longer be forced to choose between one lineup or the other.
All that to say, now that we’re on the verge of being freed from the previous provider we can finally get back to some of these types of enhancements that are long overdue. If you have questions let me know. (No, I don’t have an ETA that I can share.)
