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Cancelling TV Sucks
14 years ago
Today was the day. We have had enough of our TV service, the contract expired this month, it's time to cancel. $75 a month for DVRs that keep dying, so many channels but not the ones we want, channels that appear and disappear, occasional freezes, each button press takes two seconds to register, 4x on fast-forward is slow as needed but 4x on rewind goes at mach speed... we need to get rid of them.
Mom cancels the service (something that they can do instantly), then reinstates it upon remembering there's a couple season finales coming on tonight, holding off the cancellation until tomorrow. "The Office" season finale won't air before that occurs, but that's okay, we'll catch it online. If only that were the end of it.
So we check the TV and channel 4 is missing. Local channels may or may not have been an extra for our package, but Mom told the guy to bring channel 4 back when restoring service. Incompetence? Maybe. So she calls up and gets someone else, someone who babbles on that he can't bring the channel back. It's not the company that can't restore it, it's *he* can't restore it. But there's no call to another person, no talking to a supervisor, our attempt to restore is in the hands of someone who can't do their job. Also, he has a typical thick accent. Listen guys of India descent: it's not racism, you know English well enough, it's just Americans like Mom and I have a hard time understanding what you say. So she's tired of doing this and hangs up, admitting defeat.
I'm not about to leave it at that. It's the season finale! So I call up. I get someone who's comprehensible (hmm, imagine that). We uncancel the cancellation, he says we'll have to cancel manually tomorrow, and he says the channels will be back in a couple of minutes. I'm skeptical, so I ask whether I can keep him on the phone until I see proof that the channels are back. No, the guy hangs up on me. Nice customer service, guys. A couple minutes later the channels are back. That's good for two of the season finales we wanted to watch, but that doesn't account for "The Office".
While I was on the phone, Mom was looking into seeing the episodes online, just in case restoring the channels didn't work. So she hops onto ABC, and we're in luck, they air full episodes there. Good customer sense, not everyone can be on the TV on that special night, yay for internet TV. Just for fun, we try it out, just to verify it will work. It... doesn't. It's bad enough that Linux is on the computer and their viewer uses Flash (Linux and Flash don't exactly go together). As expected, the video pauses every two seconds to buffer. Okay then, can we pause at the beginning and wait for the episode to buffer? ...no. You pause, you watch the little gray loading thing... it doesn't move. You press play, and then it starts moving. So what is the point then!? Actually it did jump up by a significant amount, but that just means I don't know how much has loaded until I start playing again.
See, that's my problem with internet video. We're on satellite broadband, probably one of the worst to boot, so managing to stream anything is a miracle. Why do we accept having video that stutters every few seconds and does not load in the background unless it's playing? We don't have Comcast, we aren't at some university in Seattle, we aren't rich. We do not have the broadband that you think every city in the country does. Let's be frank, the world is not ready for high-definition video streaming. It's just not. Not with the atrocious broadband caps we have to swallow. Oh, and we're paying $65 for broadband. Ironically, dial-up would cost JUST as much to buy a landline again, get a long-distance line, and to hook up with a provider so hurting for revenue that they aren't any cheaper than they were 5 years ago. Let's add this up, $75 for TV and $65 for internet. Granted it's not much worse than $100 to bundle TV/phone/internet with Comcast, but we can't do that because Comcast doesn't go out to rural nowheresville. It does one town away though.
Well, we're glad the ABC shows will tape anyway. Mom goes upstairs, so I decide to check out NBC for "The Office", see how that will fare, because we have no choice but to see that online. Okay, advertisement playing, annoying but normal, it finishes... oh, nice, I have to see a second advertisement. You know it's not 30 seconds when it stutters to get through it, what good is an advertisement if not even that will load smoothly? And yeah it's Flash too. ...okay, that's over... the episode starts, it seems to be playing without pauses, seems fine. That's a relief. Sure, there will be commercials occasionally throughout, but at least watching "Office" online seems viable. One complaint though. If this is supposed to be high-definition and all -- I'm assuming so, wouldn't a network want to provide the best thing for their customers -- why is the "Office" feed noticeably low-quality? I'd understand if they're scaling it down just so the computer can handle it. That's good. Why the heck couldn't ABC do that!? Why can't Netflix do that!?
So we will watch our shows, tomorrow I'll try cancelling our TV service, and we'll see if there's any problems in pulling that off. Then we'll watch "The Office" online, 11:00pm or later because that's the only time the internet caps are lifted (don't you love when caps are so low that you can't do what 90% of the rest of the population does?), hopefully have a good experience. And then this madness will be over. I sure didn't think it'd be this much hassle.
Mom cancels the service (something that they can do instantly), then reinstates it upon remembering there's a couple season finales coming on tonight, holding off the cancellation until tomorrow. "The Office" season finale won't air before that occurs, but that's okay, we'll catch it online. If only that were the end of it.
So we check the TV and channel 4 is missing. Local channels may or may not have been an extra for our package, but Mom told the guy to bring channel 4 back when restoring service. Incompetence? Maybe. So she calls up and gets someone else, someone who babbles on that he can't bring the channel back. It's not the company that can't restore it, it's *he* can't restore it. But there's no call to another person, no talking to a supervisor, our attempt to restore is in the hands of someone who can't do their job. Also, he has a typical thick accent. Listen guys of India descent: it's not racism, you know English well enough, it's just Americans like Mom and I have a hard time understanding what you say. So she's tired of doing this and hangs up, admitting defeat.
I'm not about to leave it at that. It's the season finale! So I call up. I get someone who's comprehensible (hmm, imagine that). We uncancel the cancellation, he says we'll have to cancel manually tomorrow, and he says the channels will be back in a couple of minutes. I'm skeptical, so I ask whether I can keep him on the phone until I see proof that the channels are back. No, the guy hangs up on me. Nice customer service, guys. A couple minutes later the channels are back. That's good for two of the season finales we wanted to watch, but that doesn't account for "The Office".
While I was on the phone, Mom was looking into seeing the episodes online, just in case restoring the channels didn't work. So she hops onto ABC, and we're in luck, they air full episodes there. Good customer sense, not everyone can be on the TV on that special night, yay for internet TV. Just for fun, we try it out, just to verify it will work. It... doesn't. It's bad enough that Linux is on the computer and their viewer uses Flash (Linux and Flash don't exactly go together). As expected, the video pauses every two seconds to buffer. Okay then, can we pause at the beginning and wait for the episode to buffer? ...no. You pause, you watch the little gray loading thing... it doesn't move. You press play, and then it starts moving. So what is the point then!? Actually it did jump up by a significant amount, but that just means I don't know how much has loaded until I start playing again.
See, that's my problem with internet video. We're on satellite broadband, probably one of the worst to boot, so managing to stream anything is a miracle. Why do we accept having video that stutters every few seconds and does not load in the background unless it's playing? We don't have Comcast, we aren't at some university in Seattle, we aren't rich. We do not have the broadband that you think every city in the country does. Let's be frank, the world is not ready for high-definition video streaming. It's just not. Not with the atrocious broadband caps we have to swallow. Oh, and we're paying $65 for broadband. Ironically, dial-up would cost JUST as much to buy a landline again, get a long-distance line, and to hook up with a provider so hurting for revenue that they aren't any cheaper than they were 5 years ago. Let's add this up, $75 for TV and $65 for internet. Granted it's not much worse than $100 to bundle TV/phone/internet with Comcast, but we can't do that because Comcast doesn't go out to rural nowheresville. It does one town away though.
Well, we're glad the ABC shows will tape anyway. Mom goes upstairs, so I decide to check out NBC for "The Office", see how that will fare, because we have no choice but to see that online. Okay, advertisement playing, annoying but normal, it finishes... oh, nice, I have to see a second advertisement. You know it's not 30 seconds when it stutters to get through it, what good is an advertisement if not even that will load smoothly? And yeah it's Flash too. ...okay, that's over... the episode starts, it seems to be playing without pauses, seems fine. That's a relief. Sure, there will be commercials occasionally throughout, but at least watching "Office" online seems viable. One complaint though. If this is supposed to be high-definition and all -- I'm assuming so, wouldn't a network want to provide the best thing for their customers -- why is the "Office" feed noticeably low-quality? I'd understand if they're scaling it down just so the computer can handle it. That's good. Why the heck couldn't ABC do that!? Why can't Netflix do that!?
So we will watch our shows, tomorrow I'll try cancelling our TV service, and we'll see if there's any problems in pulling that off. Then we'll watch "The Office" online, 11:00pm or later because that's the only time the internet caps are lifted (don't you love when caps are so low that you can't do what 90% of the rest of the population does?), hopefully have a good experience. And then this madness will be over. I sure didn't think it'd be this much hassle.
