Cable karma and Comcast

Twenty five years ago, when I was running The Yankee Group and had just co-founded Battery Ventures, I would take perverse joy in getting one industry into the pants of another. Mischief City!

My finest evil moment was when I would speak at the National Cable Television Association Executive Meeting and tell the cable yahoos how to get into the telephone business . . . and then run over to AT&T/RBOCs and tell them they absolutely positively had to get into cable television ("..and those guys are planning on getting into telephony! Do you want your lunch eaten? No? Well, let me tell you what you should do!").

Each lusted after the other’s market and each won black belts in spending by building out infrastructure. And those of us backing young infrastructure companies got rich when the arms merchants (equipment suppliers) kept bidding up the price of things like cable modems.

Of course you would have to have your head examined to actually trust the cable company to deliver voice or the telephone company to mess with your HBO subscription. Triple Play, my rear. More like Triple Witching Hour. And when it came to the Internet, it really didn’t matter -- you could get horrible service from either one.

Cablevision Systems won the Boston cable franchise by bidding $2/month! Warner Amex won the Pittsburgh franchise by having two-way interactive cable where once in an exhibition football game, you could vote on whether the quarterback should pass or run on the next play!

About 18 months ago, I started having a feud with Comcast, the successor to Cablevision. Was this payback time? Was someone in Philadelphia remembering that it is better to get even than get mad? All of a sudden, my signal was degraded; I would find suddenly my screen went blank or it would go to pagination. Every time the repair person came out . . . it was always my problem, never theirs. That’s right, blame the victim.

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Twenty five years ago, when I was running The Yankee Group and had just co-founded Battery Ventures, I would take perverse joy in getting one industry into the pants of another. Mischief City!

My finest evil moment was when I would speak at the National Cable Television Association Executive Meeting and tell the cable yahoos how to get into the telephone business . . . and then run over to AT&T/RBOCs and tell them they absolutely positively had to get into cable television ("..and those guys are planning on getting into telephony! Do you want your lunch eaten? No? Well, let me tell you what you should do!").

Each lusted after the other’s market and each won black belts in spending by building out infrastructure. And those of us backing young infrastructure companies got rich when the arms merchants (equipment suppliers) kept bidding up the price of things like cable modems.

Of course you would have to have your head examined to actually trust the cable company to deliver voice or the telephone company to mess with your HBO subscription. Triple Play, my rear. More like Triple Witching Hour. And when it came to the Internet, it really didn’t matter -- you could get horrible service from either one.

Cablevision Systems won the Boston cable franchise by bidding $2/month! Warner Amex won the Pittsburgh franchise by having two-way interactive cable where once in an exhibition football game, you could vote on whether the quarterback should pass or run on the next play!

About 18 months ago, I started having a feud with Comcast, the successor to Cablevision. Was this payback time? Was someone in Philadelphia remembering that it is better to get even than get mad? All of a sudden, my signal was degraded; I would find suddenly my screen went blank or it would go to pagination. Every time the repair person came out . . . it was always my problem, never theirs. That’s right, blame the victim.

So we stopped paying the bill. No service, no payment. But the billing department and the service departments communicated mainly by rumor. Brian (last name unknown to whom we spoke often at Comcast) said, "We know that you have been paying us $100/month for 10 years, but just pay the past three months unpaid balance and we will decide what to credit you." My response was unprintable.

The newest management theory is called co-creation. It says that customers and vendors should jointly create new products. So I tried this on Brian at Comcast. "Look, do your best. At the end of the month we can jointly decide what percentage of what you said you would do, you actually did. If I only got CNN for 10 days and HBO for 15, why don’t we just pay 42% of your bill?

"It will be exciting each month when we jointly can see how well you did. Forget about 'delighting me' -- we will just together have a billing plan that suits our needs."

Brian at Comcast was not amused. I pointed out that I had upgraded to digital, I always kept my converter box sparkling clean and I had done everything on my end. Maybe we needed to go to a Cable Marriage Counselor to see if this relationship could be saved.

Of course, I then received an enthusiastic call from Comcast suggesting that I "upgrade" to their Triple Play - and the advantages of "one bill." The telemarketer professed no knowledge of my 18-month pain. He said that he didn’t know Brian. I bet.

I put them on hold.

Then I noticed a wire outside my condo window. It led up to the roof where a television antenna stood abandoned. So I am going back to antenna or rabbit ears. I may not get more than the basic networks, but then again I am not getting any more than that now.

But I am going to miss those calls with Brian. We were starting to co-create together.