Cable Companies Need True Competition and Openness. Now.

I never cease to be amazed anew at how cable companies think it is their job to make their customers’ lives difficult.

I challenge any cable executive to publicly go through the experience of being a customer at their own companies and tell me straight-faced that it’s pleasant and efficient and worth the money and effort.

Today, I drove a half-hour to the only Cablevision “store” within the area to get a cable card for our new TiVo (shhh; don’t tell anyone that I’m only now getting one). I walk in and face a wall of ladies who look more bored and angry than prisoners. I am told that they won’t give me a cable card. I must make an appointment and wait a day for the damned cable guy to come to our house to stick it in the slot. It wastes them money. It wastes me time. It wastes some more of my three free months from TiVo. It inconveniences me. It’s just stupid. I walk out angrier at Cablevision. But I’m stuck with them because Verizon tore up my street two years ago — exaggeration — to lay fibre but still has not hooked up Fios. I’m a prisoner and Cablevision knows it. But that is any excuse to treat customers this way.

For Christmas, I wanted to get my father broadband and so I contacted Bright House in Florida (with whom I used to work) to get a gift certificate. They don’t do that. Can’t I just give you money? No. So I order the service but only on the condition that the installer will hook up the wi-fi router I was wrapping for under the tree. Yes, they said, that’s included. I tell them not to tell my father and to wait until after Christmas to contact my father because, of course, it’s a present. The next day, the phone rings. They called my father. Good work, Bright House. Scrooge. I tell my father to reschedule but instead they cancel the entire account. They were going to bill him for his own present. They also tried to charge him $149 to hook up that modem. I spent a good hour and a half calling Bright House and having fits before they finally switched the billing and agreed to do what they said they would do and hook up the modem (saving the company, by the way, the expense, time, and effort of running a cable halfway around the house; I saved them money by buying a router and they complained).

And, of course, we mustn’t forget Bob Garfield’s jihad at Cablevision Must Die.

The only solution to this is true competition and openness. At CES, Brian Roberts promised a Cablevision 3.0 with the customer at the center — all of you who believe him, raise your hands — and a new standard for TV devices. We’ll see.

Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove (no relation to Bright House) sets a higher standard for a fully open alternative. We must be able to plug any device we own to the connectivity coming into our homes and get to any content. It’s that simple. I shouldn’t need to call them to beg or go to their distant offices or ever, ever, every wait all day for the damned cable guy. Connectivity is electricity.

Rather than telling Comcast that they can’t grow any bigger, the FCC should be telling them one thing: Open up.

Comments

[Philly Jim]

I share your sentiments!

I also have to say that poor customer service is becoming the norm in America. Most of these agents are being paid only a few dollars above minimum wage (products of our wonderful public education system).

What the FCC should do is set-up a new system that would require cable providers to give customers the choice for a la carte menu to chose from. They should also require that the big providers offer a minimum number of small/independent broadcasters at {their own set price}.

I see a future where your TV offers you hundreds of thousands of channels and all you need to be a broadcaster is a computer and broadband connection. If broadcasts of individual channels were priced according to what the producers ask for, that would create the ideal environment for successful competition.

I'd also like to see thousands of educational lectures and courses offered for free 24/7 without any box or subscription in every state. This should actually be mandated by the federal government considering our public educational institutions are becoming more akin to youth detention centers, especially in our deteriorating cities.

[mysaug]

One problem, who is going to pay for the content of these programs ? Not Jeff, hell, he only got TiVo because of 3 month free subscription. Want to go back to 1967 when we only got about 4 channels but they were all free? Better yet, what something for free, turn off your TV and go to library and get a free book.

[T. Mak]

Jeremy Allaire? The same Allaire that brought the world Cold Fusion and purchased and pimped JRun? Two completely closed and proprietary systems? Took standards, HTML and the Java Servlet Specification, and bent them to his own closed systems to sell his mediocre product? He's quite the expert on openess!