Keep Me (@DirecTV)

So, canceled DirecTV late last week. They tried, but not very hard, to keep us by offering to knock $30 off the bill.  I'm guessing it would be in exchange for another 24-month contract.  We declined and they let us go easily.  Within two days, this email:

This tells me several things:

(1) DirecTV can afford to charge you far less than they are. (DirecTV's just trying to get as much as they can as quickly as possible because they know they'll lose a lot of people quickly.)

(2) A product (Genie) which would have cost me a lot to purchase while still a customer, I can now get for free. (DirecTV doesn't care about its existing customers.)

(3) DirecTV doesn't use the information it knows about its customers.  (We never watched any sports in two years.)

(4) DirecTV is just playing a game. (Notice the fine-print underneath the price where it says football's not included at that price.  Also, I doubt anyone can get the $29 price - there will be taxes, fees for additional services, etc., etc., etc.)

So, yeah, if you like sports, DirecTV is probably a good choice for you.  If you want the latest CBS shows, probably also a great choice.  But if you just want to be entertained, Netflix has a really deep catalog and is a far better and cheaper choice.

Companies who have fans, those companies know retention.  But if your goal is only the next sale, or to lock someone into a contract, there's a problem with your product.  You haven't figured out how to differentiate or you haven't figured out the value proposition.

Or you're chasing after the wrong audience, allowing them to buy your product, be dissatisfied with it and then be disgruntled about it.

My experience with DirecTV was not good. There was a promotional discount period at the beginning which was complicated to actually enroll in, there was a bunch of add-ons that were designed to try to get more money out of me and were difficult to cancel, the promotional marketing was designed to always to try to extract more money from me.  And for the longest time, they couldn't even be read on an iPhone.  (The black line through the hero graphic as rendered above is my fault for shrinking the email, it rendered perfectly.)

Never did DirecTV do anything to affirm me as a customer or partner, I was just someone to shake down on a regular basis, and then come back around and see if I had more money in my pockets.

Cutting the Cord, three weeks in

Canceled DirecTV yesterday. When Lori called to cancel, they asked why.  She said we were trying to save money and they offered to continue the subscription, but for $30 less per month.  So if you have DirecTV, definitely call and try to cancel.

Last week DirecTV's DVR didn't record Survivor for some reason. We plugged in the laptop and went to CBS.com and watched it.  This week it recorded fine.  We're watching tonight.  It'll be interesting to see tomorrow if it will let us watch recorded stuff off the DVR or not.  We made a list of everything that was on it.  When we turn it on this morning, it just says that nothing's authorized, so we can't get to recordings on the DVR or any channels, not that this was a surprise. The iPhone app registers an "unknown error" - guess they never bothered to write error handling for lapsed accounts. The DirecTV2PC app on our laptop also loads up, shows the shows and then responds with a generic "An error has occurred." alert if you try to play anything. Not surprised, but thought it was worth a shot.

Thanks to the way CenturyLink and DirecTV do their billing, we haven't purchased our Roku yet. We had to pay for this month and then wait to figure out who's going to send us a refund.  When I had been researching the Roku, I started getting ads from Amazon advertising it for $10 less than it was listed on their site.  But when I'd click through the ad, it would show the full price and not the advertised price. An email this morning from DirecTV confirms end of service, but it's all about additional ways they might bill you for more stuff.

Hulu Plus charges sales tax. Whatever. Still, a little bit of a surprise.

Our daughter's had frustration with the Wii remote going to sleep while she's watching Netflix.  She's not remembering to wake it up and getting deeply frustrated when her little brother interrupts her and she wants to pause it or rewind a little bit.  Often the Wii will need to be restarted or the Airport Express will need to be restarted before it will play well without stuttering or the app crashing.  May have to move the router and printer over and wire in the Wii directly or try to encourage more devices to plug in downstairs.  Or buy another Airport Express, but that's a last resort.  (We have to keep unplugging the router and plugging it back in before we print, so maybe it's just a problem with the refurbished router.)

Our big TV was someone's cast-off about 8 or 9 years ago and they had lost the remote. Thanks to Sony and Samsung's website, it was super easy to set up the Blu-Ray and VHS remotes to control the TV.

Cutting the Cord, 2 weeks in

Ok, so we're firmly committed to cutting the cord. Ironic since there is no cord because it's satellite that we're doing away with, but so perhaps we're dissing the dish.

Netflix - We signed up for the Netflix free trial and we've been loving it. Watching TV on my iPad has totally changed my habits, though not always for the best. I watch TV while doing a lot of my chores now, but sometimes I don't move as quickly because I've been watching the screen. I discovered and watched all of The IT Crowd and have started watching Battlestar Galactica and Archer. The profiles are pretty neat.  Netflix on our Blu-Ray player doesn't work because it doesn't support the resoluton of our TV.  Thanks for that Samsung.  Netflix on the Wii works well, but earlier today there were too many devices connected to the Airport Express and it couldn't connect to Netflix. Had to put some stuff in Airport Mode before it would connect. Will have to keep an eye on that see if we need to move the Airport Express and hardwire it.  We've also encountered the issue where Rachel watching something in the living room and Lori watching something in the kitchen and I couldn't watch something on the iPad because you can only do two streams at once.

Hulu Plus - I haven't really used it, but Lori has. She complains that there's still a lot of commercials in The Voice.  They give you an entire week of free trial.  How magnanimous of them.  Apparently all children's shows are commercial free, that's cool. So the trial's already over so we got our first charge for that.

Amazon Prime - haven't used it much even though we've had it for over a year now.  We just save money on the free shipping and discounts on recurring shipments.  It's difficult to find things and it's a mix of free and paid and even if it's free to stream, it shows purchase options so you have that "wait... am I about to buy something" panic that comes with having one-click purchasing turned on.

DirecTV - we're deleting stuff we know we won't get to before we cancel. And that is becoming a bit of a challenge in and of itself. The contract ends 10/23 but the next bundle payment to CenturyLink is 10/20.  So we have to pay for another month of DirecTV and then call and cancel and wait to get a refund.  So might need to wait on the Roku box so as not to destroy the budget.

What we haven't done yet is sat downstairs together to watch stuff in a non-DirecTV way except for the few random things via the laptop, usually when the DirecTV DVR fails to record or corrupts the recording. It'll be interesting when we do make the switch-over.  Bought an extra power cord for Lori's laptop so we can more easily move it.

After that, then we'll take a hard look at cheaper cell phone options. And then the security system nd local phone line - you're next.

Cutting the Cord, Day 1

At our last house, I literally cut the cord. The cable TV to the house was strung from a high pole near the back of our house into a tree, and then at an angle down to the corner of the house. It was unsightly. The power line was also unsightly, but it was more to the side over the garage so it was less obvious. I cut the cord at the house, wound it back to the property line, cut it again and threw it in the trash. We'd never have cable. Satellite TV was good enough for us. When we moved here, we assumed being on the north face of a hill covered with trees that satellite coverage was impossible, not to mention the frequent overcast skies, so we went with cable. Later a salesman convinced us that satellite TV was in fact possible.  So I've had cable or satellite for the past 21 years. I shudder to think how much money that's cost.

We are going to attempt to "cut the cord" and give up cable/satellite. We've had enough of the high prices and paying for stuff we don't want. Did you know, whether you watch it or not, over $5 of your bill each month goes to ESPN?

We've inadvertently been preparing ourselves for this for some time now - a few summers ago when nothing was on, our friends loaned us DVDs of Vampire Diaries and Bones. We binged on those and then Firefly and really enjoyed the ability to watch a single show night after night - it was continuity in our crazy lives. And then when the new season started, we ended up doing that with most shows - letting a lot of episodes build up before we'd watch that show. It also made the experience even easier - instead of remembering the storylines and plot points of a lot of shows at once and having to wait a week to see stuff progress.