the channel you are watching has timed out due to inactivity--Rhode Island

This will happen if a switch digital video(SDV) channel is left idle for too long. This is by design. The point of SDV is to only broadcast the channel when someone is requesting it to save bandwidth space. 

Try turning your cable box to a more common channel (ABC,CBS, etc) before turning it off? Or set "power on channel" to a non SDV channel?

What steps have you already tried?

Thank you much for your help, Teck.  We always leave it on the channel we last watched - ergo...'last channel" and set the timer so the tv doesn't stay on all night.  It's our way of an ongoing sleep assessment tool.  We've used it for years like this, no matter what channel we watched and no glitches.  We'd wake up, see a screen with 'temporarily unavailable', hit 'last channel, then last channel again and the channel we'd been watching was again available.  The tv and cable box are both controlled by the cox remote 8820.  Nothing has been changed by us.  I was wondering if anyone else had seen this and heard anything from cox.  

By SDV channel, I assume you mean premium?  I can experiment, but really....for all this freakin' money we pay, I want it back the way it was and for cox to stop messing with our stuff without any kind of notice.  And we do NOT want commercials so the 'more common channels' are out.  No DVR, TIVO, etc.  

Previous step - cox tech told me to go to menu - settings - receiver - power manager - receive power - auto power off or manually.  He assumed I had contour  which changed directions, but I used something called auto  and switched it to last channel. I told him what I did & he said that would work, then asked for my account info.  Big surprise, this morning!  Not only did the inactivity screen come on, but the menu items that I used are completely different.  No permission asked or granted.  

Again, thanks for your time.  I'll call Cox if I can't work around this.

@TiffanyR I think what may be happening is the box is being left on a SDV channel and then programmed to power down before the "The channel you are watching..." comes up, which would normally change it to a non-SDV channel. It is also possible what channel are SDV has changed too. Do you know what the max idle time is? Differ by box?

@Chrishop What kind of box are you using? I think the easiest work around is to program the box to turn onto a channel you know would never be SDV. It can still be a channel you like, anything in your channel lineup which doesn't have a (*) next to it. Maybe the SD version of what ever channel your using now?

 Another work around would be to program the power off feature to be longer then the max idle time for the channel, so the box would change the channel for you. However, then you don't have control of the channel.

Hi Tiffany/All -

I don't know if the problem I'm having is related to this new "feature", but it does seem to have some connection. I have my default Power On channel set to #1101, the HD version of the Science Channel. Being that it's a SDV channel, I've also been getting the "Inactivity" message almost every day. My concern is that I'm also getting an inordinate number of "Missed Recordings" on the DVRs due to "Program Not Found In The Program Guide". It seems that when the timeout takes place, the guide also goes inactive with only a single channel being displayed until I manually enter a channel.

Is this new timeout feature the reason why my DVR is missing programs or is there another cause that might be contributing to this issue.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

I have this, too.  Driving me crazy.  There must be a solution. I turn my TV off before I go to bed.  When I turn it on in the morning, I have the sign that everyone is complaining about.  If I press the channel number it switches but WHY doesn't it just come on to the channel I had the night before?  This just happened a couple of weeks ago.  I do NOT like it.  

@GregW

Note that if you schedule a recording for an SDV channel this overrides the inactivity timeout.

That's not entirely true. I usually tune the box to local NBC station so when I get up in the morning, I can rewind to catch anything I may have missed. I get the timeout screen about 50% of the time when I turn the TV back on.

@Ric M

If you're seeing this on your NBC station I don't think you're seeing the same problem. In your case it may be the box's auto power off timer which can be accessed via the settings menu that's causing the issue you're seeing.

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