Consumerist
staples
Posts Tagged “
Video
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If you're a fan of Joss Whedon (or Nathan Fillion or Neil Patrick Harris or Felicia Day), you can watch Whedon's new online-only supervillain musical for free until July 20th. [BusinessWeek]
staples
mergers and acquisitions
Yikes: Blockbuster Dumps Plan To Buy Circuit City
Blockbuster has finished snooping around Circuit City's medicine cabinet and the verdict is in: Blockbuster has changed its mind. More »
video wars
Does The World Need A Blockbuster Digital Download "ATM?"
At their shareholders meeting Wednesday, Blockbuster announced that they would soon begin testing a "ATM"-style machine that consumers could use to download movies "on the go." More »
annoying
Policy: Blockbuster Debits $1 To Test Your Card, Then Charges You For Your Rental
For every debit or credit card transaction at Blockbuster, the company will now debit $1 to "test" your card. If the transaction goes through, they'll then debit the full amount of your purchase. Blockbuster tells us your dollar will be returned in 3-10 business days. Reader Jason says he rented a game on Thursday and hasn't gotten the dollar Blockbuster borrowed back yet. Will he get it before the 10 days is up? More »
follow-ups
Another Hollywood Video Employee Contests Earlier Claims
A second Hollywood Video employee has written in to counter the claims made last week by an anonymous employee—he writes, "It sounds like whoever wrote in initially has a particularly evil district manager who is instituting his own policies," and says that person should "go over his DM and talk to someone at corporate." But for the rest of us, what matters is that "The EW [magazine subscription offer] never went away, they just stopped requiring employees to push it. They're actively promoting it again. There's no 'silence is acceptance' however, and we need to scan your credit card (an additional time) to activate the offer." More »
possible scams
Is Hollywood Video Bringing Back "Silence Is Acceptance" Magazine Subscriptions?
An anonymous disgruntled employee sent us a long list of complaints about Hollywood Video, which can be summed up with "we're desperate to earn some money, so any tactic is fair game." Among them is this gem.
More »The Entertainment Weekly scam is coming back. Next week, the company is planning to roll out the EW "Free 8 issue, silence is acceptance" trial and force us to ask every guest if they'd like Entertainment Weekly. This is a practice which requires 100 percent compliance, so they're firing and writing those people up who aren't asking, and cutting the hours of those who don't get people to sign up for it.
bad customer service
Target Employee Says Whatever She Feels Like At The Time
Abbey is annoyed with a woman who works at the new Target store in Washington, D.C., because the woman lied to her and wasted her time:
More »One of my roommates just got a Wii, so I decided to go to Target and get "Wario Ware: Smooth Moves." Before hitting the store, though, I gave their electronics department a call to see if they had the game in stock. A woman in electronics picked up the phone and when I asked her if she had the game, she quickly said, "Yeah, we've got that in stock." So I got up off my couch and walked over to the Target to buy my game.
ads
Waste Your Saturday With 50 Funny Commercial Parodies
Nerve.com has assembled a list of 50 fake commercials for everything from Tylenol BM (you'll sleep right through your bodily functions!) to the Woomba (it cleans your noony!). There's even some that don't involve body parts, like Lily Tomlin's increasingly agitated housewife hawking "G-r-r-r Detergent" in 1975. Our favorite recent commercial parody that didn't make the list is probably the Jamie Lee Curtis commercial for Activia, because you can never get enough of women eating yogurt. More »
Target's internal crime lab is overrun with requests from law enforcement agencies for its forensic video expertise. [Forbes]
protest
Video Backlash: The Flickr Users Are Revolting
Flickr has added the ability to upload 90 second video clips! Cool, right? Apparently not. A group called "We Say NO to Videos On Flickr" has more than 25,000 members and appears to be going strong. These disgruntled users fear that video will cause the site to slow down and attract the dreaded "YouTube crowd." More »
bad company
New Shooter Video Game Charges Gamers For Better Weapons
UPDATE: EA has backed off, and has decided to offer the weapons at no charge. Kotaku has more. This is what I get for leaving a post in Movable Type purgatory for a week.Electronic Arts's "Battlefield: Bad Company" is aptly named: the new first-person shooter contains several locked weapons, the purchase of which disadvantages those who only pay for the game. Unlike most purchasable extra content, such as additional songs in Guitar Hero, the weapons for sale in Bad Company give the buyer a competitive advantage over other users, which sort of spoils multiplayer mode for gamers who only bought the standard version of the game. More »
worst company in america
Round 15: Capital One vs Video Professor
This is Round 15 in our Worst Company in America contest, Capital One vs Video Professor.
Capital One's amusing credit card commercials aren't so funny after dealing with their appalling customer service staffed by thugs and gutter snipes.
Video Professor hooks people on subscription plans, advertising that you can quit any time, then doesn't let you quit and keeps fraudulently billing you. Then when people posted complaints on infomercialscams.com, Video Professor tried to sue them out of existence and also sought the identities of the complaining consumers.
More »
deals
IFC Seals Devilish Pact With Blockbuster
IFC has inked a "devilish" multi-year exclusive distribution deal with Blockbuster, says Chicago Sun-Times blogger and editor of RogerEbert.com, Jim Emerson. More »
badvertising
Discover The Fairsley Difference!
This fake ad-battle from "Mr. Show"—a big city supermarket chain squares off against a naïve local grocer—perfectly captures a certain type of aggressive, scorched-earth advertising style usually reserved for political campaigns.
format war
Netflix Goes Blu-Ray Exclusive
Another nail in the coffin of the format war: top DVD rental service Netflix has announced that they will be going Blu-Ray exclusive. More »
customer service
Executive Email Addresses For XBOX Complaints
If you have a problem with your XBOX and you want it heard by senior executives, here are some dudes to blast it to:
robbieb@microsoft.com- Robert (Robbie) Bach- PRESIDENT, ENT & DEVICES DIV
donm@microsoft.com - Don Mattrick- SVP, INTERACTIVE ENT. BUSINESS
jabell@microsoft.com - Jeff Bell - CVP GLOBAL MKT INTERACTIVE ENT
(Photo: Milkham)
866-506-3826 is an escalated XBOX support number where they all speak English.
