Why Cablevision will cease to exist

So it's July. It's time for Tour De France. If you want to see it live, and live in NJ you have two choices:

1) Versus Streampass which allows you to watch the coverage live over the internet or
2) Versus channel 408 on Cablevision.

Now I would go route #1 but I'm not keen to sit in front of my laptop to watch the stream and as I said in my last post next year will be a Mac Mini running media instead of the AppleTV so I'll be good then. So I'm stuck with option 2 which is the topic of this post.

Now anyone with IO digital service knows that you have this box that you "rent" from the cable company. This box has a card that "validates" the connection. With this box you can run up on a channel and press a button and have on demand video. Cool technology this is. Right? Right? Well not so much.

See in order to get Versus channel 408, you have to have the "family pack." I have basic cable. That is regular broadcast. Why do I pay for that? because after 9-11 reception went to hell. 20 bucks for guaranteed reception wasn't going to break me so no problem. Besides I don't watch all that much TV.

Anyway. So I have to go up to the "family pack" which runs fifty odd bucks a month just so that I can qualify to get charged another $5.95 for Versus. 60 bucks to watch one channel for all of 3 hours a day. Oh yeah, and some technician has to come out to my place and fiddle with a box to activate all this. I kid you not.

Someone please explain to me how, in the age of video on demand and two way validation boxes and TCP/IP, is it not possible to press a button, activate a channel for 24 hours or whatever (or even call customer service to turn on a channel) and be done? Seriously. CableVision: this is bad business.

So here's the addendum to the Mac Mini plan: While On vacation next week I will be purchasing a digital converter box and I will hook up my active antenna and I'll see if I can get reception. If I get reception, when the Tour De France is over, CableVision will have permanently lost a customer.

I told the customer mugger..sorry, customer service fellow that I understand that he's just doing his job, but that this was an example of why people are ditching cable and getting their content over the internet. And maybe he ought to let his higher ups know that their business model has no future.

Of course I fully expect that the cable companies will try to give the public the "Boxee" treatment in order to protect this racket they have going on. I even expect that these execs will try to get congress to pass laws requiring laptops and other portable computing devices to refuse to play video on anything but the main screen or to probe the attached screen for it's ID and if it doesn't match up with some sort of valid string the video will refuse to show. 'Cause you know, it's never that the business model is wrong. It's the customer that "doesn't understand."

Well I understand and in the near future CableVision will have had it's hand removed from my wallet. Enjoy that 60 bucks.