| Plus they take away channels... It's not just that they've raised prices every year. It's that they've also taken away channels from the basic services. When I first signed-up with RCN, IFC and Sundance (as just two examples) were basic channels. Now they're not.
I understand that the cable channel providers are also greedy and are raising prices to RCN every year. And they're going to get greedier because advertising revenue is way down. But one of the problems is that there are far too many cable channels -- there's simply not enough advertising revenue, even in a good economy, to support them all.
IMO, RCN (and other MSOs) should assign "points" to each channel. The packages should be based on the number of points associated with the channels you elect to "subscribe" to. So you choose the channels you want. The Sports channels generally cost the MSOs like RCN the most, yet in my particular case, I don't watch a lot of sports on TV, so I'd be willing to give up some sports channels to get some other channels back. With a point-based system, everyone could get what best suited them and people could lower their costs by just taking the channels that appealed to them.
One thing I will give RCN credit for is that they no longer charge extra for most of the HD channels and they have a lot of them, although you do have to pay extra for their HD box.
Before they went digital, I didn't have a cable box. When they first announced that they were going digital and you needed a cable box, they had a promotion (which I actually think was an error) in which you got a free box. So I'm not paying for my box (although I had to argue with them over this), but when I switch to HD, I will have to start paying for it again...HOWEVER....
the pricing is now so costly that I'm seriously thinking about dropping cable TV. All of the shows I watch regularly are available for free online and while the HD quality is far from perfect (pixelation in dark areas), it's fine for most purposes.
Lately it seems like their domain servers aren't working properly. It takes forever to get to a site. Once in the site, it's fine.
Unfortunately, I live in an apartment building, so it's either RCN, Time-Warner or nothing. We do have a roof antenna that worked pretty well receiving analog channels. I'm not able to test the digital reception, but I'm not aware of anyone complaining that they can't get digital TV. |
