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Comcast forces SPAM on customer's DVR's
pvrblog.com — Comcast in a moment of shear marketing genius pisses of millions of customers and inserts mandatory SPAM adds into the guide feature of their DVR's. Comcast's responce "It is a feature that will not be removed"
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- coutub, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2This isn't my blog, but it was the best summary of the new Comcastic experience.
- coutub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5so here is their wonderful response to my request (included):
Dear -----,
We are sorry to hear of the difficulties you have been experiencing. Hello my name is ----and I will be assisting you this evening.
We do not deal with DVR problems directly and must ask you to call us at 1-888-606-0028.
Thank you for choosing Adelphia.
Sincerely,
__________
Adelphia Customer Care Specialist
Original Message Follows:
-------------------------
The following information was submitted from the Adelphia Web site:
Name:
Comments:
First off, I was an extremely satisfied customer.
I loved my dvr, your customer service, and my kick butt highspeed access.
But that is going to stop if you don't stop spamming my DVR.
MY QUESTION:'How many hours until you are going to get rid of the 'pop up' add on my dvr guide?'
This is an EXTREME dissastifier for me.
I run firefox, with popup blocker, for free.
I get your stupid 'pop up' ads on my guide, for $105 per month.
Don't explain the benefits to me, there are none, I typically get paid to be annoyed.
I refuse to pay someone else to annoy me (my boss does a fine enough job on his own thank you).
The 'pop up' significantly slows down channel surfing, I get an extra click every time I want to go down the channel listing, plus, I get this wonderful high color graphic of things I truly don't care about.
Seriously, I am a geek, I know about the discovery channel, I know about the search feature, and the history channel; yup been watching that for years.
You leave me with very little choice.
I won't tolerate paying for pop up;
You are forcing me to to get a tivo (I truly don't care how much it costs)
Or build my own dvr, I am really gonna be pi#$# off if you make me learn linux again or I will just get a satellite dish with DVR and call it a day.
But seriously, I ALREADY have what I want; I am only asking you for LESS.
How many times do you get a customer bothering to write a letter that says,'I WANT LESS, for the same money I sent you last month?'
Pretty much a no brainer, isn't it?
So 48 hours ago, I was a delighted comcast customer;
You spend millions on marketing to create a customer that WANTS your service. Why sacrifice all of that for the sake of some stupid discovery channel adds, or telling me I have a search feature?
If you changed it so I get 10 bucks by staring at this 'pop-up' ad, I would still drop the dvr service. Irational, maybe, but I want my old DVR back.
So look, I understand, some marketing pain in the butt convinced you that this was some genius idea.
I know, I work with those people all day long; but face it:NOBODY likes pop-up adds. Entire industries thrive on nothing but blocking them, and you paid some software developer to put them on MY MACHINE. Fire the marketing type, and use the cost savings to buy some beer for your AWESOME technical service folks. Everyone will be happier , trust me.
So to recap:
You paid money to lower your customer satisfaction (not good)
I used to love your company, but you are getting kicked to curb like a cheating girlfriend if you continue to abuse my trust.
But I still like you and want to give you another chancee, so
stop cheating on me with whovever is bribing you for the ads.
I pay the money and just want:Cable TV, a DVR, my highspeed, and NO FREAKING ADS.
Thanks,
---------- - wphj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3After paying $10 a month, and dealing with all the bugs the DVR has in the first place... This is unacceptable...
This is so in-your-face it's unbelievable, at least with the other guides, the ads are off to the side, this one takes the place of a 5th channel, that made the guide more functional.
I can't wait until Comcast replaces their software with TiVo's - chummel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is complete crap. I pay far too much already for this service, and now I have to look at ads while channel surfing. When I first saw this, before submitting it to PVR Blog, I called Comcast customer service to try and get it taken off. While nothing came from it, I did get him to "mention" that if enough people complained about it, we might just be able to get rid of it.
- kentuckygirl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3What the heck? I'm already paying over $100/month for cable television and now they're going to spam me on my television? WHUUUUUT? Absolutely an outrage. Can't we sign a petition or something? heh. But what option have I got? I live in San Francisco. We've got....uhm....Comcast and that's pretty much it. Bleh. I'm very pissed off about this.
- goddimus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4by the way this is also happening if you just have a standard cable box. There is a little banner ad at the bottom of the page when looking at the channel listings
- xtmno3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yep, and in order to go to the channels elsewhere, you have to click past this annoyance. When will companies learn that you need customers to be happy for them to profit?
- ht70, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0These ads are back. I'm furious. Sent the note below to Comcast:
It's hard for me to verbalize how angry I am at Comcast now. You've put advertisements on a product that I'm paying for w/out my permission (the program guide). I didn't ask for this. No customers want this. So, you are now effectively charging me to give you the medium to advertise to me. Do you really think your customer base doesn't recognize this? We're not stupid. Your customers are mad as hell about it. Peruse the internet a bit to get a feel for what folks think of it. To make matters even more laughable, you apparently have told the phone support to say the ads are a "feature" (once again, treating your customers like they are idiots).
Think of it this way. If you leased a car...let's say a 4 year lease on a nice BMW. At the end of year 2, the dealer swings by your house while you're out of town and proceeds to stamps a big, non-removable sticker on the side of the car advertising Budweiser beer. You're completely unable to remove the sticker. You don't own the car, you're just leasing it. It wasn't in the original terms of the lease, the dealer just decided he wanted to do it to make some extra cash (none of which he would give back to you). That's effectively what you've done here. Does the Comcast Marketing Dept. really think these things through?
As viable competition arises for tv service, I believe that dumb decisions like adding these ads are going to come back to haunt Comcast. These ads surely have a very small effect on bottom-line, but very high impact on customer satisfaction/loyalty. - Qposter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Soon there will be blimps that will give us signal for both tv and internet and they will be startups. Then they will get their act together and offer everything that sattilite and cable offer and they will try hard to win customers. They will support tivo and mythtv. The mythical beast will slay all advertising. Then we might be free of the media and buy what we like.
Trust me people are going to spend their money. They don't need advertising. - nchristie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Digg this! Comcast, remove this spam from the guide menu, please. It's shameless the things that can actually get implemented by some dumbass marketing minions pitching an idea to executives. Think first n00bs.
- jongnth, on 06/09/2008, -0/+0This is total bull. I just noticed this recently and found this had been dugg after I was looking to see if anyone had figured out if there was a way to turn it off. I as well am considering a move to Dish Network. (i have already had DirecTV) I really like the menu that dish has as well as they have a dual receiver that can be operated via a remote in another room and not only has two tuners but you can watch both tuners on separate TV's. pretty sweet.
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