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Channels are different dimensions of an image that holds value for every pixel - mainly - independently from the value of the other channels. So for example in case of an RGB image all pixels are represented as a Red, a Green, and a Blue values and there is no one summed value for a single pixel.

Here you can find some more information about channels.

There are several image types with different channel sets, exact meaning and content of a channel depends on this image type.

OpenCV can handle lots of image types, the documentation of the cvtColor function defines the conversion rules among some of them.

Here is an example usage of the cvtColor function.