My first thought was that this had something to do with the digital changeover, since the problem seemed to start about that time. I first tried the usual stuff, like resetting the cable box and the TIVO, but neither of those seemed to do the trick. I googled the problem, looking for TIVO, Comcast, “This channel will be available shortly,” but didn’t find anything right off that suggested a solution. So, I sent emails to both Comcast and TIVO technical support to see if they had heard of this problem and how to solve it.

I went back to googling and found a couple of forums where there were active discussions. One guy suggested that Comcast might be sending updates to the cable boxes on the hour, and if I started recordings a minute early, that might fix it.

I tried the record early fix and it didn’t work.

By this time, Comcast got back to me with a formula answer. From what it said, it was clear that once the tech saw TIVO, her brain shut down and she just copied in some boilerplate text that said they didn’t support TIVO … blah blah blah.

Another suggestion was made on the forum: try switch to the IR Blaster for channel changing. That made some sense, so I tried it. No joy.

Finally, I stopped including TIVO in my search criteria, and found that lots of people who’d just installed cable splitters were having these problems, and it seemed that when the signal was a little weak, for some reason the channels that would go out were all low numbered, just like what we’d been seeing.

My wife, Heather, spent some quality time with the nest of cables in back of the TV, and came out of it with several loops of cable she’d eliminated plus a splitter and amplifier she’d managed to eliminate. She’d also tightened all the connections up. That solved the problem.

So, bottom line is, if you encounter this problem, try making sure that all your cable connections are secure, that all unused connectors have terminators on them, and that you don’t use any more cable or splitters than you absolutely have to. Hopefully, you’ll find the problem easier than we did.