As a sharp-witted Be engineer liked to remark: “It costs more… But it does less.”
Carriers take too much money for a user-hostile experience simply because they can. In most locations, cable companies have little or no competition, so there’s no reason for them to do anything more than milk the most profit from a cheap infrastructure. As Apple Insider’s Neil Hughes reminds us, the user experience isn’t a priority for cable providers. Indeed, as I write this from Paris, I have to juggle set-top box restarts and malfunctioning secondary content subscriptions only reluctantly allowed by the main provider.
It doesn’t have to be that way. No miracle is required to make our Cable TV experience easy and gratifying.
[Maybe the Comcast deal is good one if they really want to be a technology company. They would grasp at the upside of delivering services this way and go nose to nose with Google, Apple, etc.]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 