[Ipg-smz] "More than 1 million consumers canceled their cable-TV or satellite subscriptions in the past quarter" (WSJ)

[Brian Santo]

I used to cover cable tech. The engineers really are trying to achieve the
best quality service they can. I spoke far less frequently to the
marketing/finance guys, but what they're dealing with is that margins on
video are low (and with content owners cranking up their prices at rates
you would not believe, getting lower -- some ops insist they are losing
money on video) while broadband margins are high. Meanwhile, Wall Street
analysts punish payTV providers who fail to regularly increase ARPU
(average revenue per user), and payTV ops can't increase ARPU with subs who
take basic packages. They never liked those subs anyway, as many of  them
would flit from provider to provider each time their introductory offer
lapsed. If those subs came back, fine, take their money, but no biggie when
they leave again. So, yes, payTV customer service absolutely does suck, but
there is minimal incentive to improve it for anyone other than  the most
affluent customers who pay the highest monthly fees, and Wall Street merits
some of the blame for that.

Speaking as someone who cut the cord 15 years ago, pay TV packages are
still not a bad deal for people who watch a lot of TV, and that's why I
think there are still tens of millions of payTV subscribers, and will be
for some time. The industry may be losing subs, but for the short-term
future, they are subs the industry can afford to lose.

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 2:45 PM Tom Henderson <thenderson at extremelabs.com>
wrote:

> +1
> On 11/21/18 5:22 PM, Patrick Corrigan wrote:
>
> > In a Comcast boardroom this week -
>
> > Executive - "How can retain customers?"
>
> > Jr. Executive - "How about if we don't treat or customers like dirt?"
>
> And yet, Comcast makes Time Warner/Spectum look good!
>
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 4:54 AM Phil Shapiro <pshapiro at his.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> https://www.wsj.com/articles/outlook-for-traditional-tv-goes-from-bad-to-worse-1542632401
>>
>>
>> In a Comcast boardroom this week -
>>
>> Executive - "How can retain customers?"
>>
>> Jr. Executive - "How about if we don't treat or customers like dirt?"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> --
>> Phil Shapiro, pshapiro at his.com
>> http://www.his.com/pshapiro/briefbio.html
>> http://www.twitter.com/philshapiro
>> http://www.his.com/pshapiro/stories.menu.html
>>
>> "Wisdom begins with wonder." - Socrates
>> "Learning happens thru gentleness."
>> "We must reinvent a future free of blinders so that we can choose from
>> real options."  David Suzuki
>>
>> --
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>>
>
>
> --
>
> Patrick Corrigan
> Email: phcorrigan at gmail.com
> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-h-corrigan-61669422
> Member, Internet Press Guild http://www.netpress.org
>
> "For every difficult and complex question there is an answer that is
> simple, easily understood and wrong."
>       H.L. Mencken
>
> --
> Tom Henderson
> ExtremeLabs, Inc.
> +1 317 250 4646
> Twitter: @extremelabs
> Skype: extremelabsinc
>
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