A method for recognizing and adapting to a change in a passive optical network (PON) format by an optical network terminal (ONT) (12) in communication with an optical line terminal (OLT) (18) over the PON (10) includes pre-loading a plurality of transmission formats and content formats into an individual ONT. The method also includes automatically identifying at the ONT a transmission format of a downstream signal (16) transmitted over a PON from an OLT to the ONT corresponding to at least one of the preloaded transmission formats. The method further includes automatically identifying at the ONT a content format of the downstream signal corresponding to at least one of the preloaded content formats and automatically adapting the ONT to recover information from the downstream signal according to the identified transmission format and the identified content format.