Comcast Customer Satisfaction Drops 6% After TV Price Hikes, ACSI Says (arstechnica.com) 52
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast's customer satisfaction score for subscription TV service fell 6 percent in a new survey, putting the company near the bottom of rankings published by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Comcast's score fell from 62 to 58 on ACSI's 100-point scale, a drop of more than 6 percent between 2016 and 2017. The ACSI's 2017 report on telecommunications released this week attributed the decrease to "price hikes for Xfinity (Comcast) subscriptions." Satisfaction with pay-TV providers dropped industry-wide, tying the segment with Internet service (a product offered by the same companies) for last place in the ACSI's rankings. The ACSI summarized the trend as follows: "Customer satisfaction with subscription television service slips 1.5 percent to 64, tied with Internet service providers for last place among 43 industries tracked by the ACSI. Many of the same large companies offer service for Internet, television, and voice via bundling. The threat of competition from streaming services has done little to spur improvement for pay TV. Customer service remains poor, and cord-cutting continues to accelerate. More than half a million subscribers defected from cable and satellite TV providers during the first quarter of 2017 -- the largest loss in the history of the industry. Customers still prefer fiber optic and satellite to cable, putting FiOS (Verizon Communications) in first place with a 1 percent uptick to 71. AT&T takes the next two spots with its fiber optic and satellite services."
Me like to play jokes (Score:2)
Me like to play jokes and download TV programs for free.
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Impossible sue me where I live! See me strike again joking on you ;-)
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The problem is that with the people cutting the cord you there aren't as many people to pay the relatively fixed costs to maintain the infrastructure. (Yes you could put off some of the costs but then it's worse later on when the network goes down because you didn't maintain it.) It becomes a death spiral as the company puts up the prices to pay for the infrastructure but as the prices go up, more people leave.
(The same thing is projected to happen to the electricity grid when easier, less expensive storage
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there aren't as many people to pay the relatively fixed costs to maintain the infrastructure.
No the problem is that big companies forget how to make money and start pissing all their profits away so the obvious solution is to squeeze the customer as much as they can.
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Monah (Score:1)
Money money monahhhh
That's all cable providers hear or care about.
You unhappy but still buying? You like a heroin addict bitching about your health as your buying from me.
COmpetition. THats the fix (Score:3)
How can they charge even more? (Score:2)
I'm already paying them so I can watch commercials almost half the time. That's just stupid. Program to commercial ratio seems to be about 60:40 these days, but I really should use a timer to verify. It feels more like 50:50, I'm trying to be objective.
My wife won't agree to cut the cord because of local news and sports - two things I can get from the 'net or don't care about. There's got to be a good counter argument for that, between Roku, Netflix, Hulu, etc.. I've got killer Internet bandwidth right n
Re:How can they charge even more? (Score:4, Informative)
It's around 60-40 - the current for prime-time TV is 22 minutes of ads per hour.
As for news and sports, if you can simplify the experience for your wife, you can probably cut the cord. And by simplify, I mean simplify - she probably wants to turn on the TV and then watch the news by clicking on news or something at best. No "turn on the TV, then go to web browser, enter blah, click here, there everywhere and watch". Roku might be easiest, but it's still a click-fest nightmare at times (provided your local TV station has a Roku channel app).
Sports is a bit harder since most televised sporting events are NOT streamed, and thanks to various league rules, often times the streaming services omit local events.
If you're still addicted to cable, and she wants local news, I suggest investing in a good OTA antenna setup. You can get your local news and sports for free that way in a simple format. All for the investment of a couple hundred bucks for a good antenna and maybe half a day's work putting it on the roof.
As for those that download the shows, you should know how normal TV works. Stations air programming, and that programming comes with ads to pay for the station and producing the show, etc. Viewer numbers set the ad rates, which for prime-time generally average around $80K-$150K for a 30 second spot. By downloading the show, you lower the viewership numbers, and thus the amount of money made for that program. (The Neilsen numbers you see reported are the "free" ones that no one cares about. The numbers that set ad rates are the C numbers which is the number of viewers watching the ads.). Lowering the C numbers means the show is less popular and the networks will likely cancel it if they can find a show that performs better. And the shows they replace it with are ones that attract viewers, so if all the smart people download the shows they like, the networks will actually produce less of those shows (since they don't bring in the eyeballs) Which is why a lot of TV now is driven meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator - the programming everyone wants to see everyone downloads until the program gets cancelled.
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Wow, it's like you know her. heh Truth is, she's a luddite. Even universal remotes befuddle and frustrate her, it drives me nuts. (I had to plead with her for us to get a flat screen HDTV and her a smart phone. Seriously.)
Anyway, a couple of slashdotters have now suggested the HD antenna route, so I think I'll look into that. If I'm not home to help her, our son is, and he's good with tech. As you point out, it's only gonna get worse. Though, I should also add, she bitches about people who put dish ant
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Most 1/2 hours shows are actually only 21 minutes (22 with opening and credit)
It is worse on Viacom owned channels like CC and MTV with entire blocks that have 1 hours shows with only 38 minutes of content.
And.. of course, there are the channels that are part of those great packages that 1: only show reruns of other networks and 2: only do that for 8-12 hours a day with the remaining 12-16 hours dedicated to everyone's favorite
As for your local stuff, I'm in the boo
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They don't get any of the money from ads unless they own the station doing the broadcast. The station sells time for the ads to pay for content. Some stations also get money from the cable/satellite provider which is the subscriber fees. And some stations just get the subscriber fees.
When you get your bill from the cable/satellite company the money is a combination of subscriber fees, what it takes to bring the stations to you (plus Internet, phone, etc), and their profits.
I hate the cable companies and ha
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That makes sense, I suppose.... but still, the bottom line is that we're paying to watch a lot of commercials. They should strike some kind of deal there, but there's no pressure on them to, I would suppose because most cable companies have a monopoly in their regions.
We all want ala carte in our cable subscriptions, but it'll never happen because there's no profitability in it for them. They use bundles to pad the losses they'd take from crap programming and crap channels, like the, "Watch Paint Dry" chan
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62/100-58/100=? (Score:1)
Comcast's score fell from 62 to 58 on ACSI's 100-point scale
That's a drop of 4%. Yes, I know that a drop of 4 is 6% of 62 but when you are already using a percentage scale i.e. a 100-point scale the difference measures the percentage drop of the scale it is extremely confusing and rather disingenuous to call it a percentage drop: it's a percentage of a percentage drop in satisfaction NOT a percentage drop in satisfaction. Yes, it makes the number look bigger but even in Canada, we've heard you screaming how bad Comcast is so you really do not need to work any harde
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No, that's a drop of 4 percentage POINTS.... .58/.62 = .935 ~= .94, = a 6% drop from it's previous value.
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Unless these people are actually cancelling their accounts, why should Comcast care? How are they hurt by "lower satisfaction"?
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They do a fantastic job of that all by themselves. Yeah, the math here is a bit dodgy but the point is still valid. We hate Comcast more and more every day.
Big News (Score:2)
I think the big news here is that some people actually like Comcast. Who knew?
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The real news is that Comcast actually had 6 points to loose...not sure how that happened. Must have been a Comcast billing error in the percent counting again.
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How? (Score:1)
Fascinating (Score:3)
Wow, what a fascinating story. Please, tell me more about how a company's customer base becomes less happy when prices are raised.
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Simple - in some markets, including mine, the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area, Comcastic has added usage caps to their Internet "service". Go over 1 TB/month and they'll nail you. Oh, you're given two "free" "courtesy" months of overage surcharges; we used one of them the first month they invoked their draconian policies because we had no idea how much we'd be using after we started using Netflix on our 4k TV the same month they started this policy.
Needless to say, if U-Verse hadn't reversed itself and gone with
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I was being sarcastic. This is NOT a fascinating story. Obviously, it was a slow news day.
Comcast Business router selection (Score:2)
Cisco DPC3941
++ Wireless performance seemed to be quite good.
++ IPv6 works
++ Fairly decent configurability for business purposes +- Occupies the last IP on your subnet for reasons I couldn't easily ascertain.
-- Imparts seemingly rhythmic, but generally erratic, latency (1-100 msec) on packets that t
FiOS in first place? Statistics (Score:2)
FiOS is great I'm sure, you know, for the small fraction of the population that actually live in their service footprint. And there are millions of people who can only get satellite, so of course they're happy with what they have. I seem to be the only happy cable customer I know...
Screw Comcast (Score:2)