Revenge of the Cable Customer

crimeandpunishment writes "After years of poor service and poor reception, years of hoping the cable guy shows up sometime within that four-hour window, years of constant price increases ... it may be payback time for cable customers. Cable TV companies are trying to treat customers better. Considering the industry has long had some of the worst customer satsfaction ratings of any industry, it may take a while to overcome that reputation. But they'd better succeed. Cable customers are switching to satellite and phone companies in droves. According to industry research, cable companies lost five million video customers from 2006 to 2009."

Comments

I already had my revenge 10 years ago.

[selven]

It's called replacing cable, satellite and everything else with just the internet.

Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago.

[dkleinsc]

Also known as turning off the TV and experiencing the truly wonderful show known as "real life". It can be boring at times, but the upsides are worth waiting for.

Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago.

[NervousWreck]

I pay $15 for DSL but absolutely nothing for TV. It is a law of nature that there is never anything to watch on TV. It is also natural law that people must prove this law by observation a minimum of once a week. Having 15 channels instead of 150 cuts way down on your observation time.

Right

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the phone company is known for their warm, friendly, helpful customer service. Can't speak for satellite, but my years with DSL with SBC yielded only marginal support at best.

Nothing new

[Pharmboy]

Time Warner, at least here in north central NC, has been making a concerted effort for the last several years, and actually has pretty darn good service. Their broadband is almost never down. They almost always show up when they say they will, you can get someone on the phone typically within 5 minutes, and the people on their phone support seem to actually know what they are talking about. Yes, they are still too expensive, but service hasn't really been an issue for me. We are moving our business phones and internet access to their business class service as it will save us around $30k a year, so we will see how that works out, but other than price for home service, I'm pretty happy with them.

If you want "revenge" ..

[Drathos]

.. just ask The Hammer how it's done.

Comcast's customer service is so bad they drove a 75 year old lady to taking a hammer to the local office.

Re:Sports over Internet?

[JerkBoB]

Solving the technical problems isn't a big challenge if you ignore all the politics and other nontechnical machinations at work. Realistically, there is no way the NFL, NASCAR, MLB, etc. would allow their content to be multicast without solid protection of their revenue streams. And to even get to that point, you either need to convince them to throw together their own multicasting infrastructure (complete with closed clients), or, more likely, some single entity needs to invent a magic "sports box" and strike deals with all the sports entities.

It's a mess. And all of that completely ignores the fact that the average consumer Internet connection is never going to be as reliable as plain old cable/satellite.