Is your name on YOUR cable account? You better make sure it is, because if your spouse it injured and in a coma, your cable company may lock you out of your account.

            My family found this out the hard way, and it could happen to you. Service providers only want to deal with an “authorized user” when it comes to changes to an account. Oh, sure, they’ll accept money from ANYONE, but if you want to upgrade, downgrade or cancel a service, you better be the person listed on the bill.

            Here’s the painful circumstance: a family member, Gloria, wanted to obtain a digital converter to recover channels she lost when her operator, Chart...Read More

I’ve noticed a new trend among customer service workers, and I may be a Grinch, but I hate it.

            I’ve been making reservations for holiday accommodations, calling catalog companies or dining in restaurants and recently I’ve been confronted with preternaturally chirpy service workers. You know, the ones who praise “You’re awesome” when you are brilliant enough to know the full spelling of your own name. They’re positively rapturous when you actually have your credit card handy (it’s a credit purchase, is that so surprising??) And we’re automatically on a first name basis or worse, addressed as “you guys” (a peeve I inherited from my mother).

Don Campbell is at his wit’s end trying to determine whether he can continue to deliver broadcast signals to his 150 cable customers after Feb. 17, 2009.

He’s between a rock and a hard place, literally. The rock is a mountain in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho. The hard place is Idaho City, Idaho, a former gold rush boom town with hardwood planks for sidewalks, where people stop along the Ponderosa Pine Scenic Drive. That city is nestled behind the mountain which separates the community from the source of its broadcast signals, Boise, 36 miles away.

Campbell’s community is an exampl...Read More

Another year, another Emmy Awards. This year, the TV schmooze-fest has moved to a new venue, from the historic Shrine Auditorium next to the University of California (always a challenge, weaving to one’s designated parking lot past student joggers and fat-tire bike riders) to this year’s Nokia Theater L.A. Live, downtown across from Staples Center.

We’ve graduated (I guess) from a back alley dish and porta-potty farm to the roof of a parking structure with a back door of the freeway creeping with limos.

But the big question, so far: Should we be worried??? 

I haven’t seen this much security since the twice-delayed 2001 ceremonies made trim and casual in respect to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. That year, it took this reporter 40 minutes to drive from my suburban eastern L.A. County home, and another 90 minutes to drive the...Read More

Too much of a good thing, without strong, specific customer contact, caused Charter Communications Inc. some bad press in Alabama at the end of its up-until-then highly successful Father’s Day Essay promotion.

            You may recall the operator solicited customers to write a short essay lauding their dads, with the winning missive to earn the family a new 65” HDTV television set.

            But when the contest attracted more than 10,000 entries, the operator decided to expand the prize pool so that a handful more of the most deserving essayists could win smaller prizes for their fathers. The newly expanded prize pool was announced at the same time the gra...Read More

I’m going to start monitoring the blogosphere, looking for what your customers are saying about you, so you don’t have to. It’s not always pretty but it can be informative…

It’s amazing what a positive attitude can do for consumer morale. Here, a poster named “Lengo” offers a thumbs-up to Mediacom, even after waiting 18 minutes for tech support to come on the line. Of course, it was a simple downgrade, but take the praise where it comes.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have a knowledgeable customer forced to turn to other users is a desperate attempt to rectify a connection problem after one full year.

Even $2 can turn a customer into a critical blogger, as witn...Read More

Comcast Corp. has gained another high-profile critic in the blogosphere: Howard Anderson, the founder of The Yankee Group, a prominent research firm, who’s now the managing director of Yankeetek, a Cambridge, Mass. "venture incubator."

Anderson, who’s also a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows his way around a good cable connection, and he told me that for more than three months, he hasn’t gotten one. Channels fall out, others are unwatchable and the company has, at times, blamed him and his wife for the problems, he told me.

"Anecdotally, my wife’s ready to kill the sons of b******s," he said. The situation is "certainly laughable. I knew (Comcast’s controlling Roberts family) way back when." It seems the bigger a cable company’s ads, the poorer the execution, he opined.

Consumers and lawmakers alike are raising concerns about Charter Communications Inc.’s planned trial of a technology that will track users Internet destinations in order to push targeted ads in front of those users.

            The trial will involve limited markets: San Luis Obispo, CA.; Ft. Worth, TX.; Oxburg, MA. and Newtown, CT. Charter began last week that notifying high-speed data customers in those markets last week that, for the next 30 days, they will be subjected to an “enhanced online experience.”

Let's call a spade a spade: it’s a potential “enhanced revenue experience,” a benefit to the operator if it can prove to online advertisers that this technology, from ...Read More