ISU students more than likely recognized some changes in their cable service when they returned to Ames from break.

Where are MTV and VH1? What is this, the cooking channel? What happened to ISU4?

Mediacom spokeswoman Debora Blume says the company not only added stations such as Court TV and MSNBC to the basic cable lineup, but it also removed some stations from the digital cable lineup and added them to basic cable. These include Sci-Fi and Bravo among others.

One of those changes involved ISU4, which now has a new home on channel 46 and a new name, Cy46.

Blume says some stations Mediacom carries have specifications in their contract that allow those stations to be on a certain channel. This is one of the biggest reasons for the shuffling of the lineup and the creation of Cy46.

While the station was happy with its home on channel 4, General Manager Dustin McDonough says he doesn’t see any drastic effects of the move.

“The viewers are smart people and will still be able to find us,” McDonough says.

Prior to the change, the station was about to order promotional items such as T-shirts and stickers, he says. Other factors, such as the station name and logo, must also be adjusted.

As far as viewership goes, Iowa State has no means of tracking how many people are watching the station, so there is no way to tell how much the move hurts or helps the station in terms of viewers.

McDonough says he remains optimistic that Cy46 will keep its regular watchers, perhaps even attracting more viewers.

“With new channels getting added to cable, and us being moved to 46, hopefully people will be flipping through those new stations and find us as well,” McDonough says.

Some ISU students who are from the Central Iowa area will have the upper hand with the new lineup, as it is almost identical to many of the cable lineups in the area.

The upgrade was part of a $300 million project that is scheduled to take part across Iowa throughout 2002.

Blume says lineup changes must be made in order to provide a system upgrade such as this.

“One of the things we are doing is linking many of the communities together,” Blume says. “So when we are finished, what you will see is that all of the customers will be getting the same channel lineup so that we have uniform lineups and prices.”