As a media nerd, one of the first things I always want to check when I get into a hotel room is the TV. Specifically, the channel lineup.
Things have evolved quite a bit since I was a kid in the ’80s and early ’90s, when most of the hotels we stayed at seemed to simply subscribe to the local cable system. That made it fun to visit places between large cities where there were stations from multiple places to feed my media interest (in the days before online streaming).
In recent years, many of the hotels I’ve stayed at have their own system that only carries some of the local channels. These systems use either DirecTV or DISH Network to receive signals that are then put onto a custom channel lineup, usually putting the major broadcast affiliates on low channel numbers followed by all of the different versions of HBO, sports networks, news/talk channels, and the major national cable networks.
But trying to run your own cable system can cause problems if you’re a hotel and not a cable company.
In Cedar Rapids, a hotel lineup was missing the local FOX station as a result of affiliation changes that had occurred nearly a year before my stay, but still hadn’t been corrected.
In Colorado, a hotel TV must have been programmed to receive a channel that was later deactivated on the system. The TV would lock up every time it got to that channel and I eventually gave up trying to fix it, leaving the TV on the black screen when I checked out.
Many other in-house systems omit some local stations, sometimes even PBS. One hotel in Salt Lake City carried a religious station on the channel listed as PBS.
In some cases, in-house systems are still a mix of digital and analog signals, but the analog signals are set up with varying aspect ratios. The limited hotel TV remotes, intended to be simple to use and easy to clean, don’t have a button to fix that problem.
One hotel system I encountered in Ogallala, Nebraska, this summer was only in analog, with a limited lineup of fuzzy channels from Denver shown in stretch-o-vision on the small TV in the room.
Hotel visitors can also be impacted by retransmission consent disputes that remove one of the major affiliates from a provider.
You can try to get around issues with the channel lineup by bringing your own streaming device, but it may not be possible to connect it to some TV’s or to switch to that input. A few hotel TV’s do offer direct access to popular streaming services.
Some hotel TV’s offer access to the full DirecTV or DISH Network lineup, which usually works out great. (It did feel a bit odd to be watching the Los Angeles news from Death Valley National Park.)
But even the full channel lineup isn’t always a solution. When I checked into a hotel in Glendive, Montana, I found that the TV didn’t have ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, or PBS because Glendive is one of the very few markets where DirecTV doesn’t offer network affiliates. The front desk must take a lot of complaints during football season!