At Your Service
Cabler Demands Note from Man in Coma
Is your name on YOUR cable account? You better make sure it is, because if your spouse it injured and in a coma, your cable company may lock you out of your account. My family found this out the hard way, and it could happen to you. Service providers only want to deal with an “authorized user” when it comes to changes ...... Read More
Comments (4)I'm Awesome!
I’ve noticed a new trend among customer service workers, and I may be a Grinch, but I hate it. I’ve been making reservations for holiday accommodations, calling catalog companies or dining in restaurants and recently I’ve been confronted with preternaturally chirpy service workers. You know, the ones who praise ...... Read More
Comments (0)Idaho City: A No DTV Zone
Don Campbell is at his wit’s end trying to determine whether he can continue to deliver broadcast signals to his 150 cable customers after Feb. 17, 2009. He’s between a rock and a hard place, literally. The rock is a mountain in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho. The hard place is Idaho City, Idaho, a former gold rush boom town with hardwood planks for sidewalks, where p ...... Read More
Comments (1)Emmy Arrival
Another year, another Emmy Awards. This year, the TV schmooze-fest has moved to a new venue, from the historic Shrine Auditorium next to the University of California (always a challenge, weaving to one’s designated parking lot past student joggers and fat-tire bike riders) to this year’s Nokia Theater L.A. Live, downtown across from Staples Center. We’ve graduated (I guess) fr ...... Read More
Comments (0)NBC Olympics Viewing Grid -- To Go
Fans of the upcoming Beijing Olympics will be able to access a widget that will help them access the schedule for their favorite sports, wherever they consume their media.. According to Sarah Hofstetter, vice president of emerging media for 360i, NBC’s digital agency, the widget. referred to as the "results and schedules" widget, was designed by the networks’ in-house digital media ...... Read More
Comments (0)Mad Dad Gets Fab TV
Too much of a good thing, without strong, specific customer contact, caused Charter Communications Inc. some bad press in Alabama at the end of its up-until-then highly successful Father’s Day Essay promotion. You may recall the operator solicited customers to write a short essay lauding their dads, with the winning missive ...... Read More
Comments (1)Free Offer Will Cost Ya
As if there isn’t enough about the February 2009 conversion to digital TV to confuse consumers, now comes a warning from the national office of the Better Business Bureau that an Ohio electronics firm is touting a "free" DTV converter that actually will cost a consumer more than $100. The BBB said the firm, Universal TechTronics of Canton, Ohio, has placed ads for a converter in publicatio ...... Read More
Comments (0)Brickbats and Bon Mots
I’m going to start monitoring the blogosphere, looking for what your customers are saying about you, so you don’t have to. It’s not always pretty but it can be informative… It’s amazing what a positive attitude can do for consumer morale. Here, a poster named “Lengo” offers a thumbs-up to Mediacom, even after waiting 18 minutes for tech support to c ...... Read More
Comments (0)Joke Check Bounced Back on Comcast Consumer
Krista Cooney of western Pennsylvania may have gotten a little satisfaction writing her payment check to "Comcast Vampires" in the amount of "my right arm and zero dollars," but she stopped laughing months ago. That’s when a stranger two time zones away called her to warn that the check, with all her personal identification visible, had been scanned into an e-mail, along with her Comcast b ...... Read More
Comments (0)Critcisms from the Highly Connected
Comcast Corp. has gained another high-profile critic in the blogosphere: Howard Anderson, the founder of The Yankee Group, a prominent research firm, who’s now the managing director of Yankeetek, a Cambridge, Mass. "venture incubator." Anderson, who’s also a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows his way around a good cable connection, and he told me that for mo ...... Read More
Comments (0)Charter's Big Brother Move Criticized
Consumers and lawmakers alike are raising concerns about Charter Communications Inc.’s planned trial of a technology that will track users Internet destinations in order to push targeted ads in front of those users. The trial will involve limited markets: San Luis Obispo, CA.; Ft. Worth, TX.; Oxburg, MA. and Newtown, CT. Cha ...... Read More
Comments (0)Raging Over a Condo Cut-Off
Paul Redzimski’s condo neighbors hate him right now, and it’s all because he wanted better Internet connectivity. Instead, he’s had periodic outages of his new service from Comcast, a plague he has visited on his RCN neighbors, too. And it’s not his fault but the fall-out of dealing with two big corporations that apparently refuse to talk to one another. Redzimski e-ma ...... Read More
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