Reader Jeff says:
On a normal day, losing some cable channels for a couple of hours would be an inconvenience. On a day like today, some might use words unfit for publishing. You see, today was the first game of the Red Sox and A’s seasons, played in Japan. The game started at 6AM EST, and plenty of die hard baseball fans rose early to watch… nothing. Comcast gave me a $2 credit for my troubles. There’s nothing like a $2 credit to make me feel valued as a customer.
I’m not even sure what to do. It seems that the problem was so widespread across TV carriers that there’s nobody to run to. Let this be a lesson to everyone: to be sure you’ll see the game, buy an overpriced ticket.
Jeff
It wasn’t just Comcast that had trouble during the game, DirecTV was out too. Any upset fans out there?
DirecTV out? [Boston.com]
(AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
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@Buran: “It’s not anyone’s problem but yours whether or not you get spoiled.”
And that is exactly why I watch games live.
It’s not EST for most of the eastern time zone these days. Maybe you didn’t change your clock?
@flconsumer2:
You aren’t “correcting” an issue with their service. You’re reporting an outage that they are most likely well aware of. Maybe next time you call for an issue that is of your own doing they should charge you $20 for their time. It’s a two-way street, buddy.
@flconsumer2: What we have here is a head that’s so inflated, everything else revolves around it.
No game this morning, but as I’m watching it on ESPN2 this afternoon, they showed the final score (6-5 GO SOX!!!) in the TOP OF THE NINTH when the score was tied 5-5. Nice.
18-1.
This annoyed the shit out of me for a few reasons. Mainly because I ordered DirectTV’s sports package about a month in advance for the express purpose of seeing the Red Sox season opener.
And then when I read all these posts about getting over-compensated, yadda yadda yadda… That assumes that all channels, all shows on all days hold equal value. Which of course, is patently false. I watch about 10 hours of television a week out of the… about 4,800 hours of programming available every week. So are those 10 hours that I watch only worth 0.2% of the entire bill? Not when they are the only reason I purchased the service.
Now, that’s a dangerous slippery slope because, although if I missed my weekly episode of The Office due to some technical failure on DirecTV’s part, $2.00 seems like an entirely reasonable reimbursement. But it could easily go way too far, and plus, how do you concretely measure the number of hours of T.V. you watch (and therefore the worth of each television show).
But, come on. This isn’t just a television show. This is the baseball season opener. Even moreso, this is the Red Sox season opener. This is something that happens once a year in the world of baseball, and even farther apart in the world of the Red Sox.
I understand it’s an unforseen problem, and shit does happen. I get that it’s just a game, I could have Tivo’d it, etc. etc. But what it comes down to is, I paid for a service that I didn’t receive.
Which is why I didn’t feel the least bit guilty when I demanded that the woman at DirecTV refund me the value of today’s NESN service: $0.38.
wow… two whole dollars! gee willicers! with that, i could almost get half of a coffee drink at starbucks! thanks comcast!
Cable companies are generally only going to give credit for the actual amount of service that is lost, pretty much the same as any other company. If I pay $2 a day for cable and the service goes out for a day, I would expect a $2 credit….If I pay $20 for a PPV event and it doesnt work, I would expect a $20 credit.
Seems straightforward to me.
I have comcast and hate it, but yesterday and today’s games were fine.
PS- ESPN2 has afternoon reruns……….
A few longwinded points:
It is pretty easy to avoid learning the outcome of any program if you want to. I’ve found it much better to watch almost everything via DVR. My wife is a big American Idol fan and I usually watch with her. It’s not difficult to avoid knowing who got canned. We can watch the show, skipping all the commercials and any other fluff (no comment about that being the whole show) we don’t care to see, which saves time too.
Regarding the $2 credit, I think it would have been easy for Comcast and DirectTV to refuse any refund because the situation was probably out of their control. If both Comcast and Direct TV lost the same event, it seems reasonable that a satellite link or something else not controlled by either company was the problem.
As for one channel being worth more than another, wouldn’t the company have to start charging more for some things too? Comcast could have put the Red Sox opener on E-Bay and charged the highest bidder accordingly, along with everyone else who wanted to watch. If it’s worth $50 to me, it must be worth that to everyone else too, right? Hopefully they don’t read this and get any ideas.
The reality was explained to me once and made sense, and hopefully I can relay it correctly here: Suppose ESPN wants to make $4 million and Comcast has 1 million subscribers. They charge Comcast $4 per subscriber for the one channel and everybody gets it whether he wants it or not. If it was a la carte and only half of Comcast’s customers wanted ESPN, they would each pay $8, 25% of subscribers and it’s up to $16 and so on. For some channels, which would only be watched by 1000 people, they would have to pay $4000 per month. These channels would not exist, obviously. We’d never have any new channels either, so eventually we’d end up back with the 3 channels we had 40 years ago, if that. So if ESPN gets boring and you feel like changing the channel, there would be nothing else to watch. Great for those few out there who never want to watch anything else, but terrible for those who have more interests and like to see what other channels have to offer. Never know what you might find on the other 200 channels that you’re paying so little for.
Yes, I know I have too much to say.
While I understand that the level of importance is very different,
isn’t this similar to paying for servers and then having them go out
at a crucial time? Isn’t that why I paid for the servers? So that
they would be guaranteed not to go down? What then? Do you just
prorate the amount of time the servers were down? What if the client
was a hedge fund, and lost millions resulting from the down time at a
crucial moment? If I paid the same amount for the service, do I
deserve any less because my loss was not millions of dollars? Hell,
what if I ran a sports bar, where not having the game broadcast in my
bar cost me a very large amount of money? At the very least, refund
the cost of the god damn sports package.