Considering that I was once able to feed myself for less than $37.50 a month, I don’t see how it could be that difficult to feed a kid at that cost.
WOOSH!!!
So why doesn’t “The Cabal Company” offer rewards to good customers like a free PPV if you pay on time for three months in a row?
Charging the late payers is not the only option.
Plus is your cable company in finacial straights? Or are they making booku dollars? Now that you realize that the trucks actually make money for the company.
This is my favorite complaint. “What the hell am I paying for”.
ESPN and ESPN2 both cost us $1.50 per subscriber to carry (our most expensive channel).
The average cable channel costs more than $0.50 per subscriber to carry…that is just for content.
Excuse me if my math is wrong again. but $0.50 a channel for 50 channels costs $25 a month for us to provide you with the channels…and that is not including paying the employees, buying equipment (that $8,000 line extender in your back yard does, after all, require some maintanence).
We fix all wiring we did for free. We charge subscribers to fix wiring that we did not do. And, yes…we can tell if an outlet was professionally installed…or if it was installed using sup-bar splitters, sup-par connectors, and wiring that does not meet our requirements for impedence. That is a humongous expense, but it is the only way to do it that will make the customers happy (more than three quarters of all of our service calls are necessitated because the subscriber decided he wanted to install his own outlets.)
Believe it or not, if all of our customers only subscribed to basic service (for $37.50 a month), we would have gone out of business a long time ago.
Since our digital cable launch three years ago, the number of pay-TV subscribers in our area who subscribe to a dish has dropped from 18% to just over 10%. It sounds to me like we are doing something right.
That is too bad. Let me just point out that you are not only breaking an FCC regulation, you are also a tax evader. You know that playground behind your house? That was built with franchise fees that have been collected by your local cable and telephone companies.
I can only hope that you live in a house where the expense of “fixing” what you destroyed in order to hook up your illegal cable will not cost the cable company any more money.
A case in point…it is not uncommon for us to find that an entire building needs to be rewired because one or two individuals think they are doing no one any harm by cutting into our line and putting a cheap Radio-Shack splitter out in the rain.
We recently charged an individual $450 in order to fix a building’s wiring that he destroyed. He was a little peeved, but it was a reimbursement fee he was required to pay by a municipal court.
I guess you could expand this argument to just about anything- “The slackers are ruining it for the decent people.”
There are people with a concience, and there are people with a void where a concience should be.
Yes, you can tape a PPV movie…there is no law prohibiting it as long as an individual does not illegally share the movie.
And, yes…if you have a DVD burner, you can even record the movie that way. However, I’d much rather have the actual DVD with all the “extras”.
And as a sidenote, we charge $3.95 for each pay-per-view movie. No, we do not make any money on these pay-per-view movies except what is paid to us by In-Demand to carry the pay-per-views. They charge us $3.95 per movie ordered. If a cable company is charging more than $3.95 a movie, that is where their profit comes in.
I think pay-per-view is an above average value when considering the cost of traveling to the local video store twice. However, for someone who likes to watch a movie every night (and is well versed in making a daily trip to the movie store), pay-per-view is not considered a good option. Personally, I dont’ even watch that much TV unless it is football season. I wouldn’t even have cable if I didn’t work for the cable company. Try to take away my broadband internet service, though, and you’ll have to do it kicking and screaming. I would, however, be willing to pay twice as much for that broadband than what is charge by my local cable company.
We do offer incentives to people who pay their bills on time. Every January, we apply a $20 credit to each individual’s account who went through the entire year without being late once. This is a tremendous expense to our company because, in addition to that $20 credit, the policy generates a lot of calls. However, there is no better feeling than talking to a customer who is calling because he wants to make sure his cable bill is right (I’m not paying enough this month).
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This is a very good question. Three and a half years ago, our company was on the brink of bankruptcy. As a last ditch effort to stay afloat, we instituted a massive digital and cable modem launch. The company sank more than $300 million nationally into equipment to get those products rolling…and we offered an unparalelled offer to customers when we gave them a free first year of digital service.
The ploy worked. After a year of digital service, we were untouchable in the marketplace. We had 45% of our customers hooked up to digital service which is twice that which any other cable company was able to accomplish. Two years later, we still have over 30% penetration nationwide, which is still number one in the country.
Additionally, the city in which I work has been tremendously successful in launching cable modems. A whopping 20% of our customers have a cable modem in the home. That is a far cry from the 2-3% that the average cable company has been able to institute.
While we are not out of the red, we have made leaps and bounds in that area. We have a budget set up to pay off our parent company within 10 years. That budget comes primarily from digital and broadband sales. While our digital sales have been consistantly able to reach (but not surpass) that goal, our modem sales have already reached our 2003 goal…and it is only March.
The money we receive from basic CATV customers is not enough to keep us afloat. However, with the increasing revenue from broadband sales, we have been able to vastly improve our broadband speeds. We have been able to stay a step ahead of our bandwidth limitations.
I have no doubt in my mind when I say that we, locally, are able to provide the absolute best internet service in the nation. We offer two services…500 k/s and 1,000 k/s. We are capable of offering twice that given the bandwidth we currently have access to, however, we are reluctant to upgrade given the volatile nature of bandwidth usage. We have been increasing our bandwidth availability by 200 k/s/year regularly for the past three years. We are planning on doubling that availability next spring, but that all depends on our budget limitations.
Basically put…we are doing quite well, but not as well as we would like to. Our parent company made quite an investment in us. They do not expect any sort of return on that investment for a full ten years (seven years to go). I have a feeling that we will be offereing a return on that investment before that time period is done. However, rest assured that if you have cable with us (name not included for obviuos reasons), every penny you spend as of right now is going to either help improve your service or to pay off our creditors.
Also, keep in mind that out of the top ten cable companies as of 1997, six of them have either gone bankrupt, sold, or merged. We were rated number 14 in the nation in 1997. As of 2002 (don’t have numbers for this year yet) we were rated number 6.
Though we have a LOT of work to do to overtake any of the top five companies, we are well on our way to help revolutionize the cable industry. I have a lot of respect for companies like Cox, Time Warner, AT&T etc, but they have some serious limitations to be concerned about. For instance, those three companies have spent oodles of money over the past five years in order to acquire new subscribers. Additionally, those companies spent oodles of money over five years ago to institute digital products before the technology had stagnated. Many of those areas are facing rebuild dilemnas that are simply not economically feasible all at the same time. A city like Chicago is constantly rebuilding…when they finish, they start back up again. That is a huge costs especially when considering that it costs about $3 million to rebuild a city of 20,000 people.
My company is doing well because we waited for technology to stagnate before we instituted it. Locally, we service three cities. We are facing a rebuild on about 2/3 of that area in the next three years, but we have money budgeted away to do that. A cable system needs to be upgraded every five years or so. However, in the one third of the system we upgraded a couple of years ago, we went the extra mile in making sure that the upgrade would last. We spent way too much money for technology that was so new, no one was using it yet. As a result, we are hoping that the upgrade lasts twice as long as a normal upgrade would (we did this upgrade as a test to see if it would be viable for the entire city).
I said not “entirely” their fault. What I really meant is, if you’re dealing with morons (the cable company), you have to treat them like morons. If Alice tried to institute some kind of out of the ordinary payment policy without prior consultation, then she might have expected the cable company would F*** it up. Blame in this case: 85% cable company, 15% Alice. If Alice did have a prior arrangement, blame: 100% cable company.
Sidenote: as Alice’s case illustrates, post-dating a check means nothing, and it can be cashed at any time.
Actually, if Alice didn’t make prior arrangements with the cable company regarding her pre-payment using 12 postdated checks, I’d have to say that it was probably entirely her fault it got screwed up. Most businesses don’t manually process payments, they’re done entirely by machine unless something is unreadable and requires intervention.
Also, AFAIK, postdating checks is meaningless…a check is cashable the day you present it to the payee, regardless of what date you put on it.
I think I’m a-gonna cry, gosh darn it!
I didn’t realize how much the cable company was doing for me, my family and my community out of the goodness of their hearts. Why, the sacrifices and expenditures and the maintenance of all that fancy wiring and the playgrounds fer crissakes, THE PLAYGROUNDS!!
Bless your little heart, Cable Whore!
Without revealing any proprietary information, it depends. It’s not entirely a function of time. It’s time and balance. If your monthly bill is fairly low you can go for several months before charges accumulate to the point where a disconnect notice is generated. OTOH if you spend ten hours a day accepting collect calls from your jailbird boyfriend, you’ll probably get a disconnect notice in about six weeks. Disconnect threshholds vary by state and are governed by the Public Service Commission.
I think some people in this thread are getting unnecessarily offended. The OP is talking about the lowest common denominator, the reason why we all get searched leaving Costco, the idiots who try to buy liquor with foodstamps. These are the people for whom cable is an unnatural priority, because most of the time they don’t have jobs. These are the people who will open accounts in their 3-year-old children’s names. These are the trash, the scum, the all-seeing, all-dancing crap of the universe. The OP seems to be talking to them alone.
Not to say that there aren’t some valid customer service complaints, or gripes about pricing in general, but jeez!! Since when is it not okay to bitch about ignorant deadbeats in the Pit? If you are the type of person to call your creditors when you know you’re in for a dry spell, then the OP automatically excludes you. If you pay your bills on time, the OP automatically exludes you. If you don’t complain about service you know you didn’t pay for, the OP automatically excludes you. Why all the hostility toward cable compaines in general?
When my mother-in-law signed up for cable, she wanted that bill–like all her other bills–to come directly from her checking account.
“We’re not set up to do that,” said the “technologically advanced, state-of-the-art” cable company.
Both"Mom" and her daughter knew that Mom would never remember to pay the bill on time, so we had both our bill and hers sent to our address ; paying both from our checking account and settling up with Mom later.
This worked for about 3 months until the cable idiots messed it all up by applying the entire check to Mom’s bill and none to ours; charging our account with a late fee and giving Mom a credit in the amount of our “delinquent” bill. A call to the billing office was supposed to have cleared this up.
The next month, we were “double paid” and Mom was the “deadbeat”. Another call to the billing office was to have cleared this up.
The next month…See 2 months earlier.
The next month…Well, you know the pattern by now.
Had Mom write her own check, walked both bills and both checks into the cable company’s less-than-conveniently-located billing office, got 2 handwritten receipts. Next month’s bills still fucked-up.
Fuckup after fuckup occurred each month for several years.
Then… about 20 years after all the old “low tech” utilities like water and sewer introduced automtic bill transfers from customers’ checking accounts, the "high tech state-of-the-art " cable company announced the “all-new state-of-the-art” way to pay one’s cable bill.
Finally, no more billing fuckups!!!
However,the problem of long outages on both the TV and internet sides of the service, with no compensatory reductions in the bill, remains a major headache.
Fuck the cable company and the whore city councilmen who have sold their souls to it!!!
How old is your mother that she can’t remember to write one fucking check?
How old are you that you can’t write separate checks and mail them in separate envelopes to the cable company?
is there some reason why your mother couldn’t write out twelve checks and magnet them to her refrigerator door and the day the bill comes go and get one and mail it out? Is there some reason why your mother can’t walk in the front door with the mail, see that there’s a cable bill in it, and immediately write and mail the check? Why can’t she write out twelve checks, hand them to you, and then you mail them when the bill comes to your address?
Sorry, but for a grown person to say they aren’t capable of remembering to pay a bill, absent some mental defect, is ridiculous. Sorry the cable company screwed up a few times, and yeah they certainly should compensate you for time out of service for their mistake, but jeebus, it’s not like any company is required to provide customers with any payment option other than “mail a check.”
That’s pretty thoughtless. You don’t have to be elderly to be forgetful, but saying something like that when you don’t know whether or not the woman does have some measure of senility or Alzheimers makes you a fucking jerk.
My cable company does not charge me for their programming. I bought my house, hooked the existing cable into my TV and started watching. I had the basic cable package, mostly just my local broadcast channels. A few months later, my free cable service was upgraded to a package with many more channels, including a premium movie channel. A few months after that, the cable company sent one of those precious trucks out to my house to upgrade my free service yet again. Now I have all of the channels they offer. It’s their top-tier service.
I have never paid them one cent. They have never asked me for one cent.
To upgrade my service again they’ll have to send a woman over to blow me while I watch the Simpsons.
Cable companies are run by shitheads. Stop whining about the normal costs of doing business. It’s a business, not your personal bank account.
It’s funny you should mention that. When we moved into this house, we had cable for some strange reason, expanded basic. This state of affairs continued for about 2 months, then suddenly ended. A representative of the cable company called a few hours later to see if we’d like to sign up. Now, I’m not saying they deliberately tried to lure us in, like drug dealers, or anything. It was just odd, that’s all.
I was referring to the fact that she’s an adult, not making any comment about her age being a factor in any medical conditions. Which is why I repeated the “how old are you” motif when referring to the offspring in the next sentence which I’m guessing you either didn’t read or didn’t comprehend in your mad rush to call me a fucking jerk. Fucking jerk.