Slashdot Mirror
Learning to Love the Cable Guy
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times and C|Net are reporting on new good will gestures from big cable companies. As service monopolies increasingly became the norm, quality of service began to decline across the board. Now, though, with a number of alternatives cropping up, cable companies are beginning to realize the need to ensure customers say with the often imposing service companies." From the article: "[As] service has improved slowly as satellite providers, upstart phone carriers and cell phone companies have provided attractive alternatives. And now that cable and phone companies are starting to sell similar bundles of phone, broadband Internet and television products--known in the industry as a triple play--they risk losing subscribers forever if they do not keep them happy."
Unfortunately for them, it's too late. There's a whole generation of people like me who have -zero- interest in TV of any kind, and probably never will again. There simply isn't anything on TV worth watching. Everything on TV (yes, including Discovery channel, History channel, etc.) all appeals to the lowest common denominator. Cable has completely failed to offer anything of any real interest from what I've seen. I only use a cell phone, and my business has a partial T-1. I haven't written a check to a cable company for about 10 years now, and I don't miss them one bit.
Of course, that being said, people like me are a *tiny* minority. The masses are as dumb as ever and will continue to buy whatever cable companies throw at them. They just don't have the market that they could have if they actually tried to have content that appealed to people with an IQ of over 80.