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The background:
Big Cable has been having a dispute with the NFL over carriage of the NFL Network. It's a long story, but the NFL Network offers 8 live games a year... and they want the network on basic cable, where they can extract between 55 cents and $1.00 a month for every subscriber. Meanwhile, cable wants the network on a digital sports package... frankly, outside of those eight games, it's not a very interesting channel to anyone who isn't ultra-hardcore. (It's a lot more complicated than that... but it all boils down to this... How can you tell the NFL Commissioner is lying? When he says, "We care about our fans.")
At any rate, we used to carry the NFL Network on our regular digital package because, at the time, it was cheap. With the dramatic price increase, we didn't want to raise the price of digital $1 a month for everybody, so we moved it to the $5 a month Sports Package -- those who want it can pay for it.
Whether or not that's good or fair or just isn't the point of the post.
The story:
The NFL has a email list of subscribers who are churned up about this. So, the NFL sent them a mailing, directing them on what to do.
Had they said, "Call and let the cable company know you'd like to have it back on digital," it would be okay. Astroturf campaigns are part of cable's legacy, dating back to the "I want my MTV!" campaign in the 80's.
Instead, the NFL directed people to:
1. Demand we move the channel back to digital.
2. Ask for a "rebate" on digital service for losing a channel. [A channel that cost either 5 or 10 cents a month when we originally agreed to carry it].
3. Threaten to cancel and get Dish or DirecTV.
Those three things alone do not make a cable SC... but they're the basics. It's kind of like handing someone a match, a fuse, and an explosive and telling them to "go have some fun."
The bottom line is that we haven't heard from many customers... but the ones we have heard from are... um... special. I've only seen email letters, and almost of all them use punctuation and caps with abandon... "I INSIST this be CHANGED!! It MUST be CHANGED now!!! Are you LISTENING?!?!?!?!" [Wow... a quadruple interrobang... the true sign of The Man Who Must Be Taken Seriously.]
Then there are the people who think that years of watching television 17 hours a day make them experts on the cable business... "You will be BANKRUPT within a YEAR!!!! YOU will be OUT of a JOB!!!!!"
And then there was the guy who compared the whole thing to the Cold War, with the cable company as the USSR, cable employees as apparatchiks, the NFL as Ronald Reagan and the subscribers as... who knows? But the time he got to them, even he was unable to figure out just what point he was making.
Big Cable has been having a dispute with the NFL over carriage of the NFL Network. It's a long story, but the NFL Network offers 8 live games a year... and they want the network on basic cable, where they can extract between 55 cents and $1.00 a month for every subscriber. Meanwhile, cable wants the network on a digital sports package... frankly, outside of those eight games, it's not a very interesting channel to anyone who isn't ultra-hardcore. (It's a lot more complicated than that... but it all boils down to this... How can you tell the NFL Commissioner is lying? When he says, "We care about our fans.")
At any rate, we used to carry the NFL Network on our regular digital package because, at the time, it was cheap. With the dramatic price increase, we didn't want to raise the price of digital $1 a month for everybody, so we moved it to the $5 a month Sports Package -- those who want it can pay for it.
Whether or not that's good or fair or just isn't the point of the post.
The story:
The NFL has a email list of subscribers who are churned up about this. So, the NFL sent them a mailing, directing them on what to do.
Had they said, "Call and let the cable company know you'd like to have it back on digital," it would be okay. Astroturf campaigns are part of cable's legacy, dating back to the "I want my MTV!" campaign in the 80's.
Instead, the NFL directed people to:
1. Demand we move the channel back to digital.
2. Ask for a "rebate" on digital service for losing a channel. [A channel that cost either 5 or 10 cents a month when we originally agreed to carry it].
3. Threaten to cancel and get Dish or DirecTV.
Those three things alone do not make a cable SC... but they're the basics. It's kind of like handing someone a match, a fuse, and an explosive and telling them to "go have some fun."
The bottom line is that we haven't heard from many customers... but the ones we have heard from are... um... special. I've only seen email letters, and almost of all them use punctuation and caps with abandon... "I INSIST this be CHANGED!! It MUST be CHANGED now!!! Are you LISTENING?!?!?!?!" [Wow... a quadruple interrobang... the true sign of The Man Who Must Be Taken Seriously.]
Then there are the people who think that years of watching television 17 hours a day make them experts on the cable business... "You will be BANKRUPT within a YEAR!!!! YOU will be OUT of a JOB!!!!!"
And then there was the guy who compared the whole thing to the Cold War, with the cable company as the USSR, cable employees as apparatchiks, the NFL as Ronald Reagan and the subscribers as... who knows? But the time he got to them, even he was unable to figure out just what point he was making.
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