If You Owned A Network On Basic Cable What Channel Would You Air

How are cable channel slots assigned?

Regarding the comment in your question, cable operators often assign retransmitted over-the-air stations a lower channel number, since that may either correspond with the station’s OTA digital display number; may allow the cable operator to deliver the channel unencrypted at lower frequencies via ClearQAM; or would simply reflect subscribers’ expectations that local channels would have lower channel numbers. Many home-shopping networks are carried by OTA stations, although QVC (whether as an OTA station or pay-TV channel) is far from being in the top 20 channels by popularity.As for pay-TV channels, those with the highest Nielsen ratings, or highest inferred viewership, may also be assigned lower channel numbers, as a courtesy to subscribers.Less-watched pay-TV channels may not only be assigned higher channel numbers, but may also be assigned to premium tiers, and keeping the numbers in somewhat sequential order based on considerations of popularity and carriage fees would simplify matters for the cable operator.While Switched Digital Video gives cable operators plenty of latitude to reorganize their channel lineups with genre-based number assignments, the convenience factor, and occasional need to support abbreviated lineups for hotel properties, might play into retaining old number assignments even where ClearQAM isn’t offered.

Do cable channels know what show you are watching?

Individual cable channels don’t know whose watching because it isn’t the cable channel that broadcasts the show to your home. Cable channels rely on a cable network to distribute their content.Now, here is gets complex: if the cable TV receiver has a modem in it then the cable network could get data about viewership (if it wanted to), but many cable TV boxes are actually dumb and don’t have a modem in them. It costs money to put a modem in the cable TV box and so quite a bit of the time companies don’t bother.But with increasingly complex demands by customers for interactive services and on-demand players newer boxes are tending to come with modems. So if your set-top box has applications like Netflix, Hulu or other catch-up services then it has a modem, if it can only be used for watching live TV then it probably doesn’t. If you are watching cable TV without a set-top box, just using a cablecard or DTA, then it doesn’t have a modem.Here’s the thing: it is valuable to know what people are watching, but the value isn’t as great as you might imagine. Most broadcast TV depends on estimates for viewership, such as those provided by Nielsen ratings. Direct measurement of boxes is useful but, as Joe Belkin mentions, even if you know the box is tuned you don’t know if anyone is watching and that is what Nielsen asks viewers.Also, for those who are paranoid about being spied upon, speaking as someone who has had access to vast quantities of viewing data: we don’t care what you do. Individuals are statistically insignificant and mostly boring, it is the dataset as a whole that is interesting. I did once freak my wife out by calling her at home on maternity leave and telling her to stop watching so many ‘true crimes’ shows. (I was intentionally looking at my own home box to study some behaviour I had noticed and thought it would be funny to tease my wife).

How much does it cost to launch a cable channel in the US? What kind of equipment and personnel is needed? What’s the cost, and has it substantially decreased over the last 5-10 years?

Millions, if not billions, if you want to be on traditional television. The easiest example to point to is Revolt TV, a channel created by P Diddy. He's sunk millions into it, and because of it's low viewership, he can't find many cable companies who are willing to accept the channel.  A possible silver lining is that traditional TV and cable are dying, giving way to a TV experience delivered by the internet, where the barriers to entry are much lower. YouTube is an option, as another comment has already pointed out, but that's not really a channel so much as it is a storage/hosting solution for video content. A service called Rabbit TV on the other hand has announced plans for user created channels with all of the benefits of a cable TV channel, without the high cost. You can start one for free, keep all of your advertising revenue, and even charge a subscription fee for it. Rabbit TV has about 3 million users, and because it is a media guide, it can deliver viewers to your new channel based on their interests. You can check out their press release about it here:  http://new.freecast.com/rabbit-t...

How do I start my own TV channel in the US?

Do you want to do live shows or just play pre-recorded shows? Or both?Firstly you will need to figure out what the legal requirements are? What are the national requirements for licencing? What compliance requirements are there? (Compliance is usually what biases you are allowed, what commercials you are allowed and sometimes you have to record your output in case the authorities want to see what you have output).Then you need to understand who will transmit your signals. Digital TV is transmitted in multiplexes which are where several broadcasters share the same transmission frequency. You will need to find a local multiplex operator and ask if they have capacity available for hire, or apply to the government for a TV transmission licence and build a transmitter (expensive).You will need a transmission suite, this is where your channel operation is coordinated from. Then you'll need a playout system for pre-recorded content and studios for live shows. The transmission suite often has things like graphics generators for putting logos on screen, and vision mixers doing graphical transitions between shows.