In light of recent discussions in the community about Comcast’s cable services in the towns, we thought we would voice many peoples’ dissatisfaction with it, by taking a look at the history of television and how things have progressed to where they are now.
Before cable TV made its way into American homes, television was actually a free service, programming was paid for by advertisers, and was meant to be a way to inform and unite families (sounds like a local paper we know…except the paper’s advertisers are non intrusive to what people are reading). Today, viewers pay the providers for those enhanced services, but still have to sit through the all the endless same commercials repeatedly that pay the channels produce the content that they enjoy, with an excess of repetitive commercials that seem to overstay their welcome.
You may ask why? Well, it’s the agencies that create one to two ads that repeat in a loop. They tell companies it is by repetition that consumers buy their products. Yes and no. While the ads do stick with the viewer, after a while it can get annoying can end up turning a consumer off.
Nowadays, it almost feels like there is more advertising than programming, and people are moving more towards on-demand services, streaming, YouTube and other mediums with little to no advertising, or paying a quarter of what it costs to have cable with tons of ads, to have the convenience of a service with supposedly little to none. However, this too can become overrun with ads. Even with recorded programs, fast forwarding through ads is disabled so viewers are forced to wait them out.
Even still, while you get what you pay for with cable TV (more channels, etc), and while your payments cover the cost of delivering the signals to your home, it can still feel insulting to, in a way, pay twice for a service. Particularly when many only use 3% of what is provided, and the cost of said service seems to be rising and the quality of service diminishing, and for only one option to be available, not just for cable, but for internet and phone as well.
Some people have felt that because Comcast is seemingly the only provider to get these services from, the company sees itself as too big to fail, and almost doesn’t care that its customers are inconvenienced by the continually rising costs for the same service. There also almost doesn’t seem to be any reason for the price increase, furthering the insult.
But is there a way around it? You could try a streaming service as an alternative for cable and be met with less ads and less cost, but then what do you do about obtaining the internet to provide you with that service?
There are in fact other options out there for internet, and as we move towards streaming, perhaps the need for variety in cable will diminish with that. For now, we’ve seen how things have changed, and we shall see how things continue to change.
Because at the end of a long day or week, all we want to do is sit down unwind and be entertained and not interrupted over and over with the same ads that you can not escape from no matter how much you pay even if you try. Maybe these big companies should rethink how they are getting the customers!