TV Content Delivery Foolishness

Well, the crap that has gone on today (let alone in the last year or so) has just pushed me over the edge.  Hulu is at it again trying to keep their content out of the livingroom, Rogers Cable has now joined the American Cable Cos and started compressing the crap out of its channels and StarChoice has now ended their “Home Away From Home” program!  Is there anything else that they all collectively want to do to push more and more subscribers away?

When I got married and moved out, we only had cable in the first place we lived because we rented.  A year later, we built a house and I got StarChoice satellite service.  It cost me about $70 CDN after tax and I had “all” the channels (This was in 2000).  I say “all” because the foolish CanCon rules up here in Canada keep a lot of the really good US channels out.  Slowly the costs went up and few, if any, channels were added.  A few years down the road a magical “fee” because I have more than one receiver showed up on my bill for $4.99 per month.  Let me now point out that with StarChoice, you have to buy the receivers so I own these and now I am paying for them again?!?!?!  The pitch was that it would double as a lifetime warranty on the receivers. Sure…

Well, I ate the cost because there was no real choice with cable as where I lived, Rogers had yet to really upgrade the digital services.  But not long after in 2004, Rogers was getting on the ball and they were doing a ditch the dish program that was too good to pass up (Or so I thought).  Well, I switched and for that, got free rental on a single tuner HD-PVR and a free rent SD STB.  The really big draw for me was the PVR capability and having been told that there would very soon be a dual tuner version and that I would get one of those.  Right.  That never happened and the first availability of the DT boxes was not until late 2008.  Four years later.

NOTE: My TV bill when I cancelled Rogers was nearly $100 per month and I had as little as I could get.  Quite the difference from when I had StarChoice 8 years earlier…

Well, I could rail on about Rogers issues forever but that is not the point.  At the same time that Rogers customers in New Brunswick (Me) were getting the shaft, customers with ALL the other satellite and cable providors all over North America have been getting the shaft as well:

• Shaw - Compression
• Comcast - Compression
• Bell ExpressVu - Compression
• Dish - Compression
• Time Warner - Compression
• Etc…

We are nearly all out of choices, yet these companies continue to charge more and more and deliver lower quality content at lower image quality.  Furthermore, they STILL keep teasing with things like “Whole Home PVR” and are JUST getting to it now and only in the US and then, only in very select areas!  Do they not understand that the greatest barrier to PVR sales is the inability to watch recorded content elsewhere in the house?

Oh, then the cable companies belly ache that they have to compress to give us all the HD we want.  What backwards logic is this?  We have to make things look like crap so we can sell you more crap?  Malarkey!!!  If they want to fix the issue, ditch analog cable service and that frees up enough bandwidth for over 200 HD channels!!!

So, OK, that is not going to happen…

Well, enter the hopes of Hulu.  HD content no worse than compressed cable (And likely better) that you can watch anywhere a computer can be hooked up AND you HAVE to watch the ads.  What a perfect setup.  And even one better?  It is “on demand” content!!!

Now that the old guard have caught what is going on, they are killing this off at every juncture.  Hulu has been forced to cut off every way that content can be seen from Hulu that is not isolated to a desktop or laptop PC.  No Hulu in the livingroom for you!!!  (Let alone that Hulu is technically only avaialble in the USA)

To all of this, the big media delivery companies just show us all how little they care or how few brains they have.  Nearly every sat and cable company in North America has put their TV, internet and phone prices UP!!!  Did they not get the global recession memo?!?!?!

Well, if they wonder why people are dropping their service and why places like the Pirate Bay are so popular, they need look no further than the nearest mirror.  For years they have bled us and now, as reports are showing, people are cutting services like TV in droves.

I cancelled out last June.  With all the continued price increases, feature cuts and endless quality reductions, there is just no way you could get me to pay up again.  OTA is free, bit torrent is free (But not necessarily legal) and beyond that, there are entrepreneurs out there taking real advantage of the internet like Revision3 and PCMagCast.  And if you still want a reliable pay for service, check out NetFlix or Zip.CA for mail out DVD/BluRay rental.

My advice in all this disjointed rant?  Cancel your services!  The cable and satellite giants do not deserve your money!  There are many other options out there.  Oh and guess what?  Buying stuff is not the only addiction our society seems to have… The world will not end if you only watch 1 or 2 hours of video content a day…

Watch less, get out and live…