It’s not just consumers and advocacy groups that are worried about the pending sale of Time Warner Cable to Comcast for $45 billion. On Friday, a TWC shareholder has filed a lawsuit to block the merger, claiming that executives prioritized their own bank accounts over investors’ interests for a deal that will have a difficult time passing regulatory muster. [More]
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Data Caps Are The Devil For Residents Of Rural Alaskan Towns; Are They In Our Future?
By 2.14.14
What if you weren’t able to binge watch House of Cards on Netflix earlier this week? It would be agony, right? For residents in some rural areas of Alaska the ability to binge watch their favorite shows, or enjoy that viral video online, quickly drain their pocketbooks thanks to data caps. [More]
Two Big Reasons The Comcast And Time Warner Cable Deal Is Bad For Consumers
By 2.14.14
Yesterday, Comcast and Time Warner Cable announced a $45 billion merger deal. Consumer advocacy groups (and consumers) were less than thrilled about Comcast’s big news, and ardently called on the FCC and the Justice Department to alter or prevent the buyout. [More]
Comcast & Time Warner Cable: A Wedding That Should Be Called Off Before It’s Too Late
By 2.13.14
The streets covered in snow and ice aren’t the only changed landscape many of us woke up to this morning. As we learned overnight, Comcast has reached a $45 billion dollar deal to purchase Time Warner Cable. [More]
Comcast Agrees To Buy Time Warner Cable For $45 Billion
By 2.13.14
A month after Time Warner Cable laughed off Charter’s $37 billion merger offer, the cable company has reached a $45 billion deal with Comcast that would make its nearly 15 million customers permanent citizens of Kabletown. [More]
Netflix Streaming Speeds Getting Worse For Comcast and Verizon FiOS Customers
By 2.11.14
Do you have broadband internet? Do you like to watch streaming movies and TV on Netflix? If so, great news: your connection to Netflix is getting faster! Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the tens of millions of Americans who use Comcast or Verizon FiOS for internet access at home, in which case it’s completely the opposite. [More]
Comcast, NBC Won’t Let Lower-Tier Cable Subscribers Stream Olympics Online
By 2.10.14
If you don’t like the idea of watching pre-taped, heavily edited rebroadcasts of sporting events that happened eight to 24 hours earlier (and which have probably been spoiled for you by the Internet anyway), NBC is letting some viewers of most cable providers stream all the events live online. Unfortunately, those with the most basic of cable packages apparently don’t count as far as NBC is concerned. [More]
Holy Crud, Comcast Does Something Nice Without Being Shamed Into It!
By 2.5.14
While I’ve been lucky that today’s ice storm in the Mid-Atlantic area has not (yet) taken out my power, many thousands of people around Philadelphia have no electricity going to their homes right now. And the wireless devices they’ve been using to stay updated on the outages (and share photos of downed power lines on Facebook) are quickly running out of battery power. This is the part of the story where Comcast does something nice. [More]
You Might Hate Time Warner Cable, But Would We All Be Worse Off Without It?
By 1.27.14
While Comcast might have more customers who hate it, we’d be willing to bet that Time Warner Cable is loathed by a higher percentage of its customers. Ask just about any cable-subscribing customer in NYC about the company and prepare to listen to numerous tales of screw-ups, outages, and bad billing. So some are greeting with open arms the news of TWC’s possible sale to one of its competitors. But would the disappearance of TWC just end up costing all of us in the long run? [More]
Comcast Wants To Bundle In Electrical Service With Cable & Internet
By 1.23.14
Consumers may be thinking about ditching cable TV service in favor of online entertainment offerings, and many have already replaced home phone service with a wireless device, but one cord most of us can’t realistically cut is the power line. That’s why Comcast is looking into taking over customers’ electric bills. [More]
Comcast To Flip Off Philadelphia Skyline With 1,121-Foot Skyscraper
By 1.15.14
The conversion of Philadelphia to Kabletown continues. Comcast’s relatively new headquarters already dominates the city’s skyline, pointing into the clouds like a giant USB drive. Now comes news that the Lords of Xfinity are set to erect an even taller middle finger to all the people of Philadelphia (myself included) who would much rather have another cable and Internet provider. [More]
UPDATE: Weather Channel Goes Dark On DirecTV
By 1.13.14
UPDATE: Shortly after midnight ET on Tuesday, DirecTV customers no longer had access to The Weather Channel. [More]
Comcast Fails To Stop Scammers From Opening 15 Accounts Using Same Stolen Social Security Number
By 1.2.14
A California woman recently found out she couldn’t open a Comcast account in her name because she owed the cable company a lot of money… even though she’d never been a customer before. She eventually found out that Comcast had allowed people to use her social security number to open up more than a dozen accounts, and then sent a collection agency after her to make her pay for the company’s failure to catch these scammers. [More]
Xbox One Dropping Your Online Games? You Might Be Able To Blame Comcast For That.
By 12.31.13
Does the shiny new Xbox One that Santa left under the tree work when you turn it on, but not actually do the whole online gaming thing so well? If you’re also a Comcast customer, you could be encountering a big bug. [More]
How To Determine If That Comcast Tech At Your Door Is The Real Deal
By 12.20.13
Even in these cynical times, most of us want to trust our fellow humans and try to give them the benefit of a doubt. So when someone from the cable company knocks on your door when you’re not expecting it, your instinct might be to believe that he’s not lying. Sadly, this isn’t always the case. [More]
Odds Of Comcast/Time Warner Cable Merger Are Pretty Slim
By 12.6.13
Given a shared history of treating subscribers like ATMs and of taking the “do the least” approach to customer service, it almost made sense last month when the merger rumor mill went into overdrive with reports that Comcast was looking to acquire Time Warner Cable. But the odds of this marriage being blessed by regulators seem pretty slim. [More]
Comcast Wants To Insert New Ads Into Old Shows
By 12.2.13
I enjoy the regular watching of many TV shows, but I tend to let episodes of these shows build up on my DVR until they reach a critical mass (or wait until the episodes are about to vanish from on-demand) and I spend an entire Saturday in the Morran Cave (patent pending) binge-watching while skipping over all those old ads for movies/sales/TV premieres that have already come and gone. But if Comcast has its way, I’ll soon be skipping over completely new, more relevant ads. [More]
Comcast Wants To Be Hated Even More, Adding $1.50 ‘Broadcast TV Fee’
By 11.25.13
In a move that is both hypocritical and underhanded, Comcast is reportedly adding a $1.50/month “Broadcast TV Fee” to some customers’ bills in 2014, pretty much putting a lock on the cable giant’s appearance in the next Worst Company In America tournament. [More]
