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Comcast Customer Satisfaction Drops 6% After TV Price Hikes, ACSI Says (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast's customer satisfaction score for subscription TV service fell 6 percent in a new survey, putting the company near the bottom of rankings published by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Comcast's score fell from 62 to 58 on ACSI's 100-point scale, a drop of more than 6 percent between 2016 and 2017. The ACSI's 2017 report on telecommunications released this week attributed the decrease to "price hikes for Xfinity (Comcast) subscriptions." Satisfaction with pay-TV providers dropped industry-wide, tying the segment with Internet service (a product offered by the same companies) for last place in the ACSI's rankings. The ACSI summarized the trend as follows: "Customer satisfaction with subscription television service slips 1.5 percent to 64, tied with Internet service providers for last place among 43 industries tracked by the ACSI. Many of the same large companies offer service for Internet, television, and voice via bundling. The threat of competition from streaming services has done little to spur improvement for pay TV. Customer service remains poor, and cord-cutting continues to accelerate. More than half a million subscribers defected from cable and satellite TV providers during the first quarter of 2017 -- the largest loss in the history of the industry. Customers still prefer fiber optic and satellite to cable, putting FiOS (Verizon Communications) in first place with a 1 percent uptick to 71. AT&T takes the next two spots with its fiber optic and satellite services."
It's around 60-40 - the current for prime-time TV is 22 minutes of ads per hour.
As for news and sports, if you can simplify the experience for your wife, you can probably cut the cord. And by simplify, I mean simplify - she probably wants to turn on the TV and then watch the news by clicking on news or something at best. No "turn on the TV, then go to web browser, enter blah, click here, there everywhere and watch". Roku might be easiest, but it's still a click-fest nightmare at times (provided your local TV station has a Roku channel app).
Sports is a bit harder since most televised sporting events are NOT streamed, and thanks to various league rules, often times the streaming services omit local events.
If you're still addicted to cable, and she wants local news, I suggest investing in a good OTA antenna setup. You can get your local news and sports for free that way in a simple format. All for the investment of a couple hundred bucks for a good antenna and maybe half a day's work putting it on the roof.
As for those that download the shows, you should know how normal TV works. Stations air programming, and that programming comes with ads to pay for the station and producing the show, etc. Viewer numbers set the ad rates, which for prime-time generally average around $80K-$150K for a 30 second spot. By downloading the show, you lower the viewership numbers, and thus the amount of money made for that program. (The Neilsen numbers you see reported are the "free" ones that no one cares about. The numbers that set ad rates are the C numbers which is the number of viewers watching the ads.). Lowering the C numbers means the show is less popular and the networks will likely cancel it if they can find a show that performs better. And the shows they replace it with are ones that attract viewers, so if all the smart people download the shows they like, the networks will actually produce less of those shows (since they don't bring in the eyeballs) Which is why a lot of TV now is driven meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator - the programming everyone wants to see everyone downloads until the program gets cancelled.