Finally, a cable company you don't hate!
Finally, a cable company you don't hate!
This is a resource for creating your own personal little cable company. Personally, I’m aiming for a 12 channel system, including a program guide channel, a weather channel, and more. Check out my system status here.
For fun, mostly. Play with some new-to-you technology and create your own channels with their own personas.
Like many hobbies, there are varying degrees of how “into it” you get. It has definitely taken me a lot more time, money, and effort than I initially thought. I have a small server rack containing a 24 port PoE networking switch, a shelf that holds one set of (Raspberry Pi 3b+, PoE Hat) per channel, a Blonder Tongue MIRC-12 2U mini-modulator rack w/ power supply containing 12 MICM-b modulators, and a Blonder Tongue OC-12 output combiner.
The whole thing pretty much flows in rack order, top to bottom. My Synology NAS lives elsewhere on my network and holds all of the TV Shows, Movies, and Commercials that play on my cable system. The switch provides data and power to the Raspberry Pis, which output composite video to the modulators. The modulators have their signals packaged together in the output combiner, which provides the final signal viewable on the TVs throughout my house.
One of the Raspberry Pis runs the Scheduler application. That same Raspberry Pi is responsible for outputting the video feed of the program guide. Each other Raspberry Pi runs the Technical Director program, which consults the scheduler and queues up the videos, interspersing commercials as needed.
The combination of those two programs gets you a simulation of a TV channel, and several of those starts to look like a cable system. By coming up with coherent schedules for a given channel’s persona, you can create a fairly realistic experience.
Not all channels have to show videos, either! For example, the brilliant WS4000 Simulator gives you a very realistic weather channel with current forecasts and weather data for your area. You can tell the Scheduler that the weather channel is a 24 hour listing (like the guide channel), and feed the output of WS4000 to that channel’s modulator. Another example might be a music video channel, where instead of showing episodes of a show, each timeslot represents a theme or genre. This channel would have a similar, but better suited for the context Technical Director-style program controlling the video feed.
Something I’d like to do in the future is have the Scheduler be able to “follow” a real channel’s listings, and use my HD Homerun to add OTA channels that show classic content. I look forward to seeing what others build.