Great News! We're Taking Away Some Service! At No Extra Charge!
from the such-friendly-service... dept
What is it with cable companies to take some bit of news and try to spin it as if it's much more positive than it really is? The latest is that Comcast apparently sent around letters to certain customers telling them they had "great news!" Apparently Comcast was "simplifying [their] channel lineup... at no additional charge." Of course, by "simplifying," they really meant taking away channels you might watch and putting them in a more expensive premium package. Just imagine what sort of "upgrade" people would have gotten if there had been an additional charge? Anyway, when asked to explain the "good news" that resulted in two fewer channels, Comcast explained that, because of the removal of TBS and the Discovery Channel, basic cable customers now have their channels better grouped by genre. No, seriously. The big "upgrade" is that now all your news channels are grouped together. Your music channels. Your sports channels. All together now. It seems that TBS and the Discovery Channel were mucking up all of that order and just getting in the way for channel flippers who didn't want their flipping between SportsCenter and The Best Damn Sports Show, Period interrupted by a glimpse of Monster Garage. Great news, indeed.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Discovery?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: No Subject Given
Also there's a difference between "basic" and "basic cable"--I don't think anybody was getting only ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Telemundo, Fox, WB, UPN, and then TBS and Discovery.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in thread ]