|
Pay-TV subscribers increasingly unhappy with monthly bills, survey says
Feeling ripped off every time you cough up a truckload of change for your monthly cable or satellite-TV bill? Join the club.
The latest edition of J.D. Power’s annual survey of residential pay-TV service just came out, and as Multichannel News notes, it should serve as a wake-up call for the big pay-TV operators — and cable carriers in particular.
Exhibit A: The rating for customer satisfaction (maybe "dissatisfaction" is more like it) with the cost of pay-TV service. The rating for 2010 dipped a good 2.5 percent, from an already not-so-great rating of 555 (on a scale of one to 1,000) in 2009 to 541 this year.
Indeed, the J.D. Power survey (which includes data from more than 28,000 U.S. TV households gathered between November 2009 and last July) found that of those who are "definitely" or "probably" going to switch carriers in the next year, a full 74 percent blame the cost of their monthly bills for wanting to make a change.
Interestingly enough, viewers polled in the J.D. Power survey are still relatively OK with the quality of their television service, with this year’s TV-satisfaction rating coming in at a decent 629, down just three points from 2009. It’s when cost is factored in that subscribers really start to grit their collective teeth.
So, who are the big winners when it comes to this year’s pay-TV survey? Nope, not your traditional cable carriers like Time Warner or Cablevision, nor satellite operators DirecTV or Dish. Instead, it’s the upstart telcos — that is, telecommunication companies that have jumped into the pay-TV business.
Verizon’s FiOS service, for example, took top honors in the Eastern region of the country (DirecTV also got high ratings in the East, but Verizon was J.D. Power’s ultimate award winner in the region), while AT&T’s U-verse was tops in the South, the West, and North-Central states. In other words, pay-TV viewers seem to like telco carriers the best.
Satellite TV carriers didn’t do too badly either, with both Dish Network and DirecTV consistently getting four or five stars out of five in J.D. Power’s overall satisfaction ratings.
Meanwhile, cable providers tended to fall anywhere from the middle to the bottom of the list, with carriers like Cox and Time Warner Cable in the four- to three-star range depending on the region.
At the bottom of the J.D. Power list, usually with just two out of five stars, three cable carriers appear time and again: Charter, Comcast, and Mediacom Communications.
And guess which pay-TV subscribers are the most unhappy with their monthly bills? Yep, the cable customers, whose satisfaction with the overall value of their TV service is about 18 percent lower than that of satellite-TV viewers and a full 22 percent lower than telco subscribers.
Personally, I’m right there with the crowd in terms of being pretty unhappy with how much I’m paying for cable.
As a Time Warner subscriber, I’m shelling out about $130 for service, which includes an HD DVR and consumer-grade broadband Internet (with my upload speeds capped at an annoyingly low 500Kbps) but no premium channels like HBO or Showtime ... and in fact, I can count on 10 fingers the number of channels I watch with any regularity. But when I go through and price everything out in à la carte fashion, my monthly total always ends up costing more than my current bundled plan, which includes hundreds of channels that I never watch. Funny, that.
Now, there’s a chance I’d be happier if I switched over to, say, Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-verse, given the J.D. Power rankings — except Time Warner is the one and only pay-TV choice in my neighborhood (besides satellite, which isn’t an option in my building).
What about your monthly pay-TV bill — are you getting a good value, or are you feeling ripped off?
|
