Because They Are Scorpions
Come on, when was the last time a cable company overlooked an opportunity to jack up their bill? You had to know they were going to pull something: Digital transition could cost cable customers
WASHINGTON – For months, TV viewers have been told by government, by industry and by the media that if they already subscribe to cable, there’s no need to worry about the coming transition to digital broadcasting.
So cable customer Doris Spurk was surprised to learn that thanks to the transition, she would have to rent a converter box for $5.95 per month, per television set, plus pay for a $60 service call to install it. With five televisions in her home, the conversion would increase her bill by 75 percent.
“It really ticks us off,” the 63-year-old central Florida resident said. “If they are in the right and can do this — charge these prices — then the educational effort that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is doing is really misleading everybody.”
Yes, the cable company could run both the analog and digital signals, and some of them might, but they can save bandwidth and make a larger profit by switching to all digital and “leasing” a $50 converter for $6/month for every analog television a customer has. The $60 service call for a $10/hour technician with 30 minutes of training is icing on the cake. When they lost the ability to charge for the cable splitter and wire for extra sets, and then cable-ready TVs cost them the ability to lease converter boxes, you had to know they were looking for another opportunity to screw their customers.
I don’t watch television, and the antics of cable companies is one of the main reasons.
8 comments
My slogan for the recently purchased cable company in Houston: “Comcraps – it’s a crap shoot.” Many people have no trouble. But those who do needn’t expect any help. Comcraps is utterly unhelpful, often even insulting over the phone.
One of our neighbors bought a new digital TV. After an unpleasant song-and-dance with Comcast, she also bought rabbit ears and told Comcast what it could do with itself. If all one wants are the digital broadcast stations, that apparently works. That is all I want, and that is my current intention when the time comes.
The article talks about an individual with 5 televisions. What in hell would anyone want with 5 televisions?
If you live in an area that actually has broadcast television available, like a city, an antenna is all you need with a small digital set. It’s possible to pick up one station in this area, and it’s garbage. There used to be two, but the Pensacola station reoriented their antennae to cover Mobile, rather than the Panhandle to the East of them, so it’s cable or nothing, and I prefer nothing.
I have 2-1/2 televisions (the 1/2 is a tiny B&W set that sits on the desk in my office and allows me to watch significant live events when I can’t leave my computer; I’ll miss the little thing when it stops working). I intend to buy one good digital TV for the living room (size as yet undetermined; it replaces a 25″, 25+-year-old TV) and one converter box for the considerably newer though smaller bedroom TV, which I watch as much as the one in the living room.
One or the other TV is on perhaps 3x per week. I lived for over 20 years with no viable TV and no sense of hardship, but now I would miss a few news shows if I didn’t have access to them. And Stella would quit visiting if I had no TV. 🙂 As you note, it is more convenient for me to have them than it would be for you.
I have a 20″ TV that has a week of use on it when I loaned it to a neighbor because hers broke and she was having family visit for a week. It could be attached to my VCR, but I haven’t bothered.
There’s also a 5″ battery powered portable for hurricanes, but that will be useless now unless you rig it to a converter box that also accepts battery power.
Actually the local cable system is the first thing to go and the last to return in hurricanes because it’s mounted on the power poles, and when they are reconnecting the electricity, anything in the way gets cut.
My Mother doesn’t hang around for hurricanes any more, so I don’t worry about TV at all.
I hate cable companies. There, I feel better already.
Even if you have a digital tuner you still need to rent a converter box to decrypt the digital signal that you already pay for, as I recently discovered. Nice racket they have going on there. I have a digital tuner card in my pc, but it won’t receive those channels, only the analog ones. (I like having the tuner card so I can listen to baseball games. Because greedy major league baseball won’t let local stations stream game audio or video over the internet.)
They make higher margins from equipment rental than anything else they do. They keep creating their own standards so that you have to lease the things from them, just like the phone company did before the AT&T break-up.
A cable modem isn’t even a possibility for me. At some point I will shift to satellite because the DSL price keeps climbing via odd taxes and services fees that no one seems to be able to explain. It’s coming up with the $400 initial installation that I haven’t budgeted for that has prevented it from happening. I have to build a base for the satellite that will withstand a hurricane, so it’s a bit of work.
are the dishes that difficult to take down and put back up? the people i know who are doing this are putting up simple poles and planning to take just their dishes down of a hurricane threatens.
I have a site problem because of buildings to the South of me. I need to put up a 20-foot mast to clear the obstruction. Most people can just install them at ground level, so they don’t have a problem. This is why I haven’t done it before.