Rant: Cable companies

Ok, so the room mate and I recently signed up for digital cable with Comcast. I berkeleying hate Comcast, and judging by what I've seen on sites like consumerist.com, I'm not alone.

The fee for the service is 80 bucks a month, and I think this money should not be seen as a service fee, but rather a hardware lease. As in we are leasing the box for an astronomical 80 dollars a month. Because really, I cannot fathom why we are expected to pay for programming that is funded by advertisements. What's more, I'm looking through channels, and noting all the channels we don't get, (the Science Channel, Nat Geo, etc).

We have to pay more per month, so Comcast can hit a button that unblocks those channels for us. It does not cost Comcast more, to provide us with EVERY berkeleying CHANNEL AVAILABLE. I understand premium channels are commercial free, and therefore those cost more, but any channel that runs ads should be free, provided we pay to lease the box, which once again, should not be 80 berkeleying bucks a month.

In this age of the internet, why are we as consumers so berkeleying useless at organising a boycott. Am I alone on this board in my thoughts? Am I wrong about it not costing Comcast anything to provide us with more channels? Let me know if someone has a job in this industry.

Also, I informed my room mate to utterly refuse to pay the installation fee. We started off by getting the non HD service, then decided we wanted to upgrade. For the SD service, we went to Comcast, picked up the box, and installed it ourselves. And we still had to pay an installation fee for this. For HD, a guy came to our place, and hooked it up, in spite of being told not too, because we had our home theatre set up the way we liked it, and when I came home, I had to undo everything he did, and reconnect everything using HDMI and surround sound.

I don't think we should have to pay an installation fee when the guy was told not to touch a berkeleying thing, and I had to undo his work and redo it the way I wanted it done.

Also, I'm sick of cable providers treating bandwidth like a natural resource, claiming that if you use more bandwidth, you should pay more. Bandwidth is more akin to a pipe, than the oil that flows through it. Get bigger pipes, and you have more bandwidth... But I mainly wanted to rant about the tv issue, because if I go off on the internet thing, my head will berkeleying explode, and I already feel bad for the E36 M3 the custodians at my office have to go through.

I will go back to cable when and if they have a pick your own channels type of service.

There are only a handful that I ever watched and the rest are just in the way.

Of course it would also have to be priced right, so I am not holding my breath.

Actually it costs Comcast or ANY cable company millions (if not billions) of dollars to bring you those channels. Not only are there the fees for them to actually having the channels available for you to get in the form of contracts with those channels (for channels like ESPN you are talking hundreds of millions of dollars). Then there is the actual expenses of maintaining the equipment and lines to maintain the service, unlike popular belief E36 M3 breaks and it has to be fixed ASAP. Also you have to consider unexpected damages to equipment caused by storms, accidents, and pricks thinking its funny to shoot up the equipment (it has happened repeatedly). Then when you have something break (or are to stupid to put your TV on 3 or AV) they have to pay to have reps available for you to call and try and troubleshoot your problem with you, they have to pay to have people in the service centers, the local offices for you to exchange equipment, and people in the network building with all the equipment to maintain it. Oh did I mention that for most of these companies its having people available 24/7?

Also the cash for commercials does not go to the cable company themselves, they are only carrying the channels, they have no control over what is actually being aired be it programing or commercials. That money all goes to the channels themselves.

I worked for Comcast for 5 years and 2 other major telecommunications companies over 3 additional years.

Well, then I stand corrected and am swallowing my pride whole.

I'm still broke as berkeley and think E36 M3's overpriced.

I got a special deal. 70-something channels for $11 a month. If I didn't get such a good deal, I wouldn't have cable.

Yep there are always deals out there with you local provider and Comcast in particular always has them and is very good about even letting existing customers on them as long as they aren't just jumping from one promotion to the next and not adding services.

Also another thing that drives up the costs of cable over satellite is the cable companies have MORE regulations they have to meet than satellite companies. These regulations cause the cable companies to have more people on hand 24/7 than the dish people.

Roomie said he researched on how to get deals from the company when signing up for new service, and totally failed to seal the deal.

Then your roomie is obviously somewhat lacking in the brains department. Its called find out what deals are available, ask for said deal during order, done. Try calling your local office see if there is a deal on the account, if not find out if there is one that will apply to your service they can put on. Fairly common on new orders.

Yep, my company dicked me around a bit at first, and the bill was messed up for the first few months, but now I get 70+ channels, cable internet and phone with unlimited long distance for $66 a month plus taxes and fees. I think It comes out to $74 a month total. It helps that I worked on the cable guy's motorcycle, he gave me every possible deal that he could.

I totally agree with everything you said...the telecoms industry has one of the highest concentrations of evil among all industries next to insurance companies, patent trolling tech R&D companies and the music/movie recording industry.

Just disconnect your cable and torrent stuff, and maybe give back to the torrenting community by getting a basic cable package and ripping shows you like.