bert003,

Consider making a cableTune("CNN") function. Now, the buttons that select a cable or satellite channel are independent of the "box", port, IP address, TV service and you can tweak all of the characteristics in one spot.

It's a bit of work to get it going, but worth the effort. Imagine a multi-room icon based approach where there there is a 4x5 matrix of icons, four or five tabs across the top (News, Sports, Local, Movies, Kids), and each tab with two or three layers down (Movies1, Movies2, etc.). At first blush this sounds grotesque, but it is dirt simple for the user. Users learn to work with this scheme in a few seconds. Then imagine that the user changes TV services. This could be grotesque for the programmer, but in my scheme only cableTune() needs to be adjusted.