The slowness can also be because the channel you are trying to watch is not even there. I'm not sure who all is using it now but I used to work on the setup fo

The slowness can also be because the channel you are trying to watch is not even there. I'm not sure who all is using it now but I used to work on the setup for Switched Digital Video. If nobody in your neighborhood was watching a certain channel, it would stop getting broadcast. That freed up bandwith for other things like internet. Once you would tune to a channel, a request would go to the head-end, it would quicky figure out if the channel is being broadcast in your area. If not, a request would go to the content delivery system to start feeding it to the QAM and then obtain what frequency the channel was on, and finally relay that back to the settop box which would tune and start the decoding process. Rather impressive tech but again, this would add a bit more latency to that particular channel switching.