Posted on 08/20/2003 7:35:17 AM PDT by UB355
For the first time, cable TV subscribers are spending more on services each month than satellite TV subscribers, but they still aren't as happy as their satellite counterparts, according to a study released Tuesday
Consumers now pay an average of $48.93 a month for satellite services from DirecTV and the Dish Network vs. $49.62 for services from cable operations, according to J.D. Power and Associates' 2003 Residential Cable/Satellite TV Customer Satisfaction Study. The study surveyed 133,000 consumers nationwide.
Subscribers gave both satellite services higher marks for overall satisfaction than cable subscribers on six factors: reliability, cost, billing, promotions, image and customer service.
The average monthly tab for cable TV is up 41% since 1998 vs. 8% for satellite TV. Much of that has been driven by larger rate increases as cable operators spent money to upgrade networks. But the study also indicates some consumers have been willing to pay cable operators more for services available from the upgrades such as digital TV, video on demand, high-definition TV and broadband.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, however, consumers ranked DirecTV and Dish Network as the top two companies in the survey. Cable firms Cablevision and Adelphia ranked last out of 13 satellite and cable providers listed in the survey.
Sounds like they don't want to play nice with others and are basically holding you hockey fans hostage.
That sucks. I can get Fox Sports on my dish.
SD
Same here. My wife is addicted ti "Six Feet Under" on HBO, but with DSS I can order HBO the night I need it and cancel it immediately after the last show. Any program package change is done within a few minutes.
Not so strange. Here's the deal. Comcast owns the Flyers and Sixers. While they want everyone to subscribe to Comcast, they know that not everyone who wants to watch the Flyers and Sixers games will (or can) subscribe to Comcast. Comcast still wants those eyeballs on the games. Accordingly, they cut deals with the other Philly area cable providers that they would carry CSN, provided that Comcast not make the channel available to satellite providers. They all know where the real threat lies.
Personally, I don't care. I don't voluntarily watch much TV anyway, and I have no complaints about RCN. Well, OK, one complaint. When the cable goes out (as cables do), I lose the phone service, too. :-( It's only happened once, though.
On the contrary, basic economics tells us that if sports were not available on TV, the box office price would increase dramatically.
SD
Which makes sense for the Sabres end of the business - people want to watch the games, so you want to maximize the ways in which they can do so. But it's a tradeoff, as you point out - satellite dishes were sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm when I was up there, because Adelphia service, as this article points out, is awful, and way too damn expensive for what you get in return...
A degraded digital signal is a horrible thing to see. It isn't a graceful decay of picture quality like an analog signal starting to pick up noise. It is major dropouts, glarring noise, etc. That's because a digital fault can hit a most-significant-bit just as easily as a least-significant-bit.
As for fiber versus coax, they both have signal attenuation over distance and therefore require reamplification (aka limiter or quantitizer) at the receiving end. In the analog world, this introduces noise. In the digital realm, if the noise is below the trigger threshold, it is completely eliminated. That's why digital signals don't degrade -- up until the point they just go to complete h*ll.
They can and they often do. They put either a pass filter or a stop filter out at the box on your line.
I "sold" back my dish network system for $300 cash to them and a reduced everything package for $33/month when I lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon. They didn't show half of the advertised Mariner games (the season they won 116 games) and I had multiple ghosts images on all the local network stations.
Of course they only person who told me that the first 100 channels are not digital was the repair man. The people that work for the cable outfits are completely brainwashed. I got into an arguement with the VP of customer service with Charter and he tried to tell me that I could not have possibly had all the stuff that dish network offered. I asked him if he had ever experienced sat. tv and he said no of course!!!
Consumers now pay an average of $48.93 a month for satellite services from DirecTV and the Dish Network vs. $49.62 for services from cable operations
ooh, a whopping 69 cents. Cable is still better. I have my phone service, cable modem, and tv on the same bill each month. And I don't have to have one of those stupid looking dishes on my house.
I pay $37, but that includes high definition channels, and ole Chrlie Ergen says more high definition channels are on the way. Watch Charlie chat on Sept 8th.
DSL service?
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