dW

Interesting Predicament

This all starts with a story like all things. I’ve been having to resort to downloading TV shows off of the internet because of the horrendous quality Comcast offers here. It’s so bad that the local paper wrote an article urging locals to find alternatives to Comcast because of their horrible service. At the moment the only way to cancel or get any troubleshooting on your service is to drive to their local office as the phone lines are full of customers complaining about how horrible it is or attempting to cancel their service. The BBB have been brought in to investigate their actions.

Their service is so bad that on channels provided on regular cable it is better to watch them on regular cable than it is to watch them through digital cable. Comcast rips the customers here off by receiving analog feeds from the low tier channels, converting them to digital, and sending them back in the form of “digital channels”. This goes for about 80 channels that are provided through regular cable.

I received a letter in the mail from Comcast’s “Legal Response Center” on my downloading of Rome Season 2, Episode 9 off of BitTorrent. They say I am in violation of the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” and that it is a violation of their acceptible use policy; it may result in a suspension or termination of my service account. I say go right ahead. It’ll give me an excuse to try alternative or perhaps better methods of receiving the internet.

As a result I have sent an e-mail back to their “Legal Response Center” stating my differences with the company and my reasons for downloading “illegal content”. In my opinion it’s not illegal when I am unable to watch the show on TV when I pay for it. Here’s what I replied with:

Thanks for mailing me this letter regarding my downloading of Rome Season 2, Episode 9. I have had nothing but rotten service from Comcast ever since our local Time Warner Cable provider was bought out by you. I have in the process lost about 12 channels on my TV, saw an incredible loss in quality on my TV, and a higher monthly bill on both digital cable and internet. I subscribe to HBO and if you look at my records you will see that I subscribe to it, but the problem is that the quality of the picture is so horrendous that I am forced to download the episodes off the internet to even watch the show or many of my favorite shows for that matter. The problem with my downloading this episode off the internet comes down to YOU. If the quality of my service wasn’t so deplorable I wouldn’t have the need nor the desire to download any television programming off the internet. I see this as a fair trade. I can’t get it through digital nor HDTV cable in quality good enough for human viewing, so I download it. Plain and simple. Fix your cable service and I’ll stop downloading episodes off of the internet.

If you would be so kind please contact my local Comcast Cable service provider in West Monroe, Louisiana and tell them that I’ve been trying to call them for the past few weeks trying to resolve my TV quality issues with them, but I am unable to get to talk to someone as the waiting time is around an hour at the moment. To tell you the truth it’s because so many people from this area are calling to complain. Even the local paper wrote about how atrocious the quality of service Comcast has here. People are unable to cancel their service with Comcast because they are unable to get ahold of a service representative to cancel their service or to even troubleshoot it. We are not used to this kind of irresponsible service, and we are not about to put up with it.

I cannot watch this show on demand because that service stopped working after Time Warner left and I guess the local Comcast service provider doesn’t have a comparable service to Time Warner’s On Demand service. I can’t watch the episodes at my leisure anymore, but then again I don’t want to because the quality of my cable service has taken a huge dip. Don’t even get me on DVR service because if I record the show off of the TV using the DVR it is in a lower quality than it was on the TV, so I would be watching it in even lower quality than I would normally. No thanks.

You can feed this information to HBO/BBC. I own the first season on DVD and bought it through Amazon.com. So if they want to use this violation of our civil rights to go see that I purchased it through Amazon be my guess. The second season isn’t offered on DVD yet. I don’t know if I’ll be purchasing it or watching anything on HBO again or anything owned by the BBC as I feel I am being violated. Why don’t you spend your time going after people who actively download episodes off of the internet to create themselves a collection of episodes to use instead of purchasing DVDs? I have shown to you that I am not an active pirate and that I will purchase the shows that I like when they are offered for purchase. As this is not offered for purchase at this time I would gladly send you a proof of purchase when it does come up for purchase. Would you or HBO care to see that? I doubt HBO would care because they cancelled it, certainly the best show since Band of Brothers in 2001 (I own that on DVD, too).

This all comes down to Comcast’s inability to provide proper service to its customers. I pay over $100 a month for garbage. Provide quality comparable to the amount being paid out by customers and perhaps most of this activity will stop. It won’t stop completely, but you will know that your customers downloading TV shows off of the internet at that point in time are active violators of copyright law and not people like me who find it necessary to get their TV shows using this method to watch them once and delete afterwards.

Get off my back and have a good day.

I wonder what their reply will be. It’ll probably be a cancellation of my services. Oh well. Big loss I say. Oddly enough as a complete opposite to this I got my free gift from Nintendo Power in the mail of Twilight Princess’ soundtrack and its strategy guide. At least that’s a plus.