Slashdot Mirror
The Cable TV Industry Is Getting Even Less Popular (fortune.com)
Aaron Pressman, writing for Fortune: It seems nobody loves their cable TV or home Internet provider. Wireless carriers, however, are on the upswing.That's the news from the huge annual survey of 43 industries from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. In 2017, cable operators and ISP tied for last place, with an average customer satisfaction rating of just 64 percent. The wireless industry was still near the bottom of the rankings, in 38th place, just below the U.S. postal system. But its 73 percent score was up almost three percentage points from last year. Many of the same companies, like Comcast and Verizon, dominate both fields, ACSI noted. And neither industry offer much choice to consumers, with most localities having only one or two cable and Internet providers. The cable industry's rating slipped 1.5 percentage points from last year, while the rating for ISPs was unchanged.
Seriously, I never have any problems with lost mail, it arrives dependably and at the same time every day, and even with the frequent stamp price increases it still seems like a bargain to send something coast-to-coast in a couple of days for less than a buck.
The only bad thing I might have to say would involve standing in line at the post office, but even that is not really necessary very often anymore with online postage and pickup. I think the US Postal Service should get very high marks. Maybe I just don't use it enough.
The only service I have through Mediacom is internet. Their service is ok for the price. But their customer service is horrible, they talk down to you and treat you like you're the enemy. I got a DMCA violation for downloading a CD that I owned. So I cleared all copies of it out of everywhere. Yet somehow it happened again. They insisted that it can still be uploading even if I don't have a bittorrent client installed as long as I have the .torrent file. They shut off my internet. So we got a new account in my girlfriends name at a different address, we had an official 2nd address with an A at the end through the town. After a couple of months they shut her off because the post office forgot to actually register the 2nd address and they had her voice recorded calling for support on my previous account. Finally after enough ass kissing they turned on her account, but she had to agree not to let me put any of my devices, not even my phone on her service. The only other alternative is a DSL provider who will sell you a 7Mb package but you'll be lucky to get 1.
The half a million who switched to streaming services are the ones who are actually dissatisfied.* The ones who keep paying a monthly bill for cable TV are satisfied enough.
Actually, no, I'm not dissatisfied streaming. What I was dissatisfied with was having 200 channels of mostly unwatchable garbage, paying $100 a month for commercial ridden shows that I didn't really want to watch.
... with gasoline.
Cable TV is grossly over priced.
I suspect they've found that the profit yield curve peaks for them selling $240 packages to the top 20% who don't care about price.
I cut the cord on cable TV and if money ever gets tight, my cell bandwidth is now high enough and fast enough that I'll probably kill cable internet and use my cell for internet.
Cable TV used to cost about 8 minimum wage hours back when it started. And that was with the two premium channels. And it had a fewer commercials. Now it's easy to hit 24 minimum wage hours. And with more commercials.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You are off by over an order of magnitude.
Cable subscribers have dropped by over 8 million households since 2017.
And the longterm trend is towards the European model with much lower rates of subscriptions except for sports fans.
Business Insider estimates it will cut the value of media companies (esp Viacom) by about 40%.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm rather surprised that the Cable / ISPs managed to beat the airline industry here. Must be either short-term memory, or maybe a lot of people don't fly often.
At least the Cable / ISPs don't physically drag you away from your TV or computer screen. Nor are you at all liekly to need pat-down searches for TV or internet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The half a million who switched to streaming services are the ones who are actually dissatisfied.*
[...]
* excepting the very small minority who can get cable TV but not cable Internet
What about the very sizable group that can get high-speed internet access only from a cable company which offers them a discount cable, internet, and phone service bundled which makes it actually cheaper to have cable? Those people can be cable subscribers, and yet dissatisfied with cable, and also be rational consumers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
An hour time slot is filled with 40 minutes of actual content, the remainder being commercials. There's no better painful reminder of this than Netflix. Go back and find a show from the 80s, or the 90s and note the playtime, and compare it to today. And the way the bundles are set up, you end up having to pay an extra $40 just to get the one channel that was actually worthwhile.
There was a time where TLC was actually about learning. And A&E was about arts and entertainment. They are an utter waste of time now.
Choke on your lost profits, cable companies.
But how much longer is that going to last? Once cable viewership falls below a certain threshold the sports leagues are going to jump ship in a hurry, and either find a new middle man to broadcast games online, or simply make their own. The whole business model only works so long as the cable companies can guarantee the leagues and advertisers sufficient viewers. That's why I think cord cutting, when it reaches a critical mass, is simply going to see cable TV collapse. There's a point at which it isn't sustainable anymore.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you are steaming, you should probably get that looked at. Or else leave the sauna, the steam is likely to harm your electronic device.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.