Regarding the TV:
Sounds like the cables on the front might be shot…hard to say.
The front panel comes off and then there’s a bunch of wires running around the screen where the border plastic is.
A test to try.
After it “warms up”.
Make a fist and go up to where it usually shows the scrambling and thump the plastic border right next to the edge of the screen a few times and see if something like the scramble flashes on and off the screen while you do that.
In regards to this:
Kind of…
But really; it’s not at the provider’s choice yet.
See…HBO doesn’t yet WANT their service to be “per show”.
See, the reason you get charged the way you do, is because of how the Cable Company gets charged.
Cable Companies pay contracts that agree to crap.
They then have to follow those things at the studio’s request, and several studio’s are lumped under various business ownerships.
So it’s not so much that the cable company doesn’t want to…as they will go for whatever makes money (and it’s no secret that impulse purchasing makes a crap load more money for any provider of any industry).
The problem is that impulse buying doesn’t make AS MUCH for the supplier (in this case, the studios).
Because it makes the contracts a projection of earnings and worth rather than a fee for license.
I understood what you said, but that guy might not understand. Anytime I try to speak professionally (as you did) nobody understands me, so I have to resort to verbal aggression and threats.
It’s a corporation, they don’t have an ethical anything! That’s not actually a bad thing, per se, it just is what it is.
I will try that and let you know the result tomorrow, thanks for the help with that!
Well, Comcast should just tell HBO, “We won’t have HBO anymore, then.” HBO would be forced to cave into Comcast’s ridiculous demands because there are no other cable providers in many of Comcast’s areas!
Of course, DishNetwork could then have HBO, and maybe people will sign up for Dish for that reason. That’s a good thing because it will force greater price competition between Dish and Cable.
Those are good points, but I’m sure the studios would take something as opposed to nothing, so they should just threaten not to carry that station anymore.
That may all be well and true in a free market, but we don’t have such a thing in Cable.
Cable, to prevent monopolizing, is FCC mandated to carry certain classifications of service and varying studios are of varying classifications.
And in so doing, the Cable company must also abide by contractual dues to the studio’s regulations that they have to meet.
The studio’s have to meet certain mandates to keep certain licenses or else suffer heavy penalties from the FCC.
I’m not kidding about this.
The literal reason why your cable selection blows ass is because of the FCC’s attempts to make your cable service fair…or rather, to make the broadcast carrying of studio’s fair.
Meaning, the FCC sees cable as a threat to studio’s because studio’s depend on cable companies to survive.
Therefore, to keep the cable companies from becoming the mafia of “hollywood”, there are streams upon streams of regulations that tailor mandates of what channels a cable company must carry and in what fashion they are allowed to offer them.
Did you know that a cable company may not refuse to carry local service programming, nor are they allowed to offer them in a way that would exclude them from reaching the public?
Think about that.
That means that this simple little mandate in itself poses a serious obsticle to al la carte cable service.
Why would the average consumer choose to have every local channel if they could just choose the national specialty networks (heavy-hitter news networks, academic networks, hobby networks, sports networks, etc…) and get their local news on the web?
Even more so, how is it possible to keep something like low budget local stations alive if everything is pay by program; not even network.
A local station can’t afford to make VOD versions of itself.
The cable company can’t be made to pay for that either.
Why?
Cable TV barely makes a profit.
I know…sounds insane.
But then you realize that Cable is 100% physical…cellular is not.
To get cable to you, a mass of physical property and energy must be put into place that is so mammoth in expense that simply upgrading the capacity of an already existing network costs millions and millions of dollars (hundreds of millions in many cases).
The daily upkeep is absolutely insane.
All I see all day long are reports of technicians logging in and out of various network nodes conducting work to keep the system going.
Then there’s the Head Ends, without which there would be jack shit.
They are staffed to the nines with alterations daily.
It’s like the engine room of a great steamer…it never stops being tinkered with.
Then there’s the hundreds to thousands of field technicians going out for all sorts of shit to customer’s houses.
They cost the company at least $150 per person they visit per technician at an average visit time of 15 minutes per person in an 8 to 10 hour work day.
That’s an absolute shit-ton of money.
How much money really are we talking?
8 hours at 15 minutes per person is 32 people a day for one technician.
32 people in one day at $150 is $4,800 per technician in an 8 hour day.
In a 10 hour day, the technician would cost $6,000.
In just a staff of 60 technicians, you are looking at a range between $280,000 to around $350,000 PER DAY!
It’s mind numbing how much money is spent on something that makes SO LITTLE MONEY FOR MOST EVERYONE INVOLVED just because SO MANY PEOPLE WANT IT.
Cable is damn near socialist (no negative meaning).
Flip over to the world of cell…
Aaaaaand we’re done!
It’s not THAT simple, but damn near.
One tower that relays to another tower, etc…
No lines between them.
No physical property to go to the customer for.
Hell…customer’s come to you; they spend their own gas money to bring you their cell phone…if they need to at all.
90% of the support can be done over the phone for cell phones.
The phones are feature rich and in high demand with equally high prices leaving massive leverage room for lowering prices for attractive contract negotiations with customers.
The bandwidth and airtime is…well…yours.
It’s your cell tower.
You provide the service, you originate the source, you, you, you…no studio, no physical lines, no dues, just whatever you want within the laws of wireless signaling codes set by the FCC.
That’s it.
Weeee!
And greater still…unlike cable, when other cell providers want to cover your area, guess what…you can charge them steep for the roaming contracts which last long periods of time guaranteeing revenue long term at high interest…it’s not like you are paying for the signal beyond the energy needed to produce it or anything.
Try doing that with ads you are forced to carry on your TV programming by the FCC of your various television provider competitors; you’ll get fined, and probably sued.
Our company…for example…makes fractions on the dollar for cable and people think our pricing is theft.
Meanwhile, we make hand over fist on cell (INSANE amounts of money) and people think we’re the best priced provider!
It doesn’t prevent the monopolizing of anything; it just regulates the monopoly that already exists. This was especially true before shows became available on the Internet and before the advent of Dish, they had absolutely nobody to price compete with at those times.
Yeah, but because of the Dish cable is not quite as much of a threat anymore, the studios can also use Internet airings and the ad revenue therefrom as an income source, so it’s not like they have to wholly rely on the cable companies anymore.
What the FCC should have done is forced a cable company to carry the studio if the studio wants to be carried, but that shouldn’t necessitate a deal that sucks for the cable company because what sucks for them sucks for its consumers and (in many cases) derives from a channel that nobody really wants to watch.
I wasn’t aware of that, but the inability to not have a la carte programming makes a lot more sense given that knowledge.
I do not necessarily believe that there is any reason that a local station must survive. If it can’t do it with its News, Local Sports and Syndications, then it just isn’t meant to do it.
That’s pretty nuts, I never realized so much upkeep was required constantly. Obviously, I knew that there would be substantial initial costs related to such things, but I didn’t think the upkeep was so constant.
The fundamental flaw in your calculation is that you are not accounting for time in transit.
When I smack the TV, by the way, it does the same thing right around where I smacked it for less than a second and goes away again.
I’m sorry not to respond to the cell stuff, I read it all, but don’t know nearly enough about it to even begin having a conversation.
That’s not what they are looking at in regards to monopolizing.
They are looking at it from the angle that Cable is the provisioning entity; the carrier.
The internet, for instance, doesn’t have really much of a problem because the studio can carry it freely however they please.
Cable, on the other hand, has always been perceived as a threat to determining WHAT a studio would do, or would determine the fate of a studio dependent on whether they chose to carry the studio or how they carried it…if they had that power freely.
Keeping in mind; the internet and satellite TV are relatively new carrying systems for TV by comparison to Cable.
ATT once carried cable TV and telephony service over coaxial cable…when?
Back in 1936.
From it’s earliest years, Cable TV was treated as a UTILITY and still is.
It’s seen by the FCC as if it were Telephone service, but visual format.
All of it’s regulations are based around this idea.
That a Cable company could KILL local (what originally was common) over-the-air stations.
So they have to carry them.
This is similar to a telephony regulation that refers to the “Local Incumbent”.
In telephony, per each area there may ONLY BE ONE Local Incumbent, and no other following service provider may EVER remove the Local Incumbent telephone provider.
So much so, that every company coming in after the Local Incumbent that wants to carry phone over copper MUST use the Local Incumbents copper line network and pay the Local Incumbent what they WOULD make per customer that the competing company is serving instead. (nice…how do you like that for avoiding monopoly…good job FCC)
Note…they aren’t paying the Local Incumbent the commercial wholesale value of that copper…they are paying the price the Local Incumbent would receive from a customer, PER customer that the secondary company is serving.
That means the customer’s of the second company have to be charged MORE than they would be charged by the Local Incumbent if the second company wants to may even a penny off of the sale of that phone service.
Alright, take this mentality…now let’s shift over to Cable.
The Studio’s are seen like this Incumbent of Telephony and the Cable company is seen like it’s the second guy coming in.
So the FCC only sees Cable as a threat, but a necessary threat because they have the resources and capacity to build the physical network and run it to carry the Studio’s feeds and bring them to consumers.
Think about it like this…imagine a Grocery store was told what products it MUST carry and how they MUST carry them because they carry the potential to kill the revenue of products based on what they choose to order.
Stupid right?
Well…that’s what takes place.
Cable isn’t seen by the FCC like you and I as consumers think of it.
It’s seen like an electric company of sorts.
So when I say, “to prevent monopolizing”, I’m referring to this idea the FCC has that a Cable company will suddenly up and control (somehow ) what shows exist in the “world” and what shows won’t.
Alright…maybe in 1936 that was partially true.
Um…it’s 2010 now, and as you quite easily point out…there are other means of transportation of television now.
We can watch it on the internet, cellphones, satellite, and DVD.
The difference is that Satellite was originally not seen as anything more than a HAM radio variation of television.
Over time…that has drastically changed…yet Satellite is not classed as a Utility, while Cable is.
Satellite doesn’t have to carry local programming.
They don’t have to carry anything that they don’t want to actually.
They just have to abide by their bandwidth regulations of air frequencies so as to not infringe on other air frequency technology systems and services.
Wooptie-doo.
So really…the one group we all should be asking about regarding the lack of an al la carte option is Satellite…not cable.
Cable is still fighting to break free from this antique tyrant hold that the FCC has on it with this strange concept that it’s some kind of Utility.
Where does that come from anyway right?
Well…you know those REALLY damn annoying emergency broadcasts that interrupt your TV watching?
Those only exist on Cable TV.
Cable is seen, more so originally, but also still today, as THE reliable means for the government to communicate quickly to the mass of America in emergency situations.
Ah fucking hell…
There goes any damn chance of not being classed as a Utility.
Every studio wants to be carried.
And originally local studios (keep this in mind) WERE THE studios.
There wasn’t an HBO.
National networks came far later.
So we have this dinosaur left…these terrible local studios; hell these local studios don’t even really carry their own programming anymore!
They just relay some national network’s feed…wait…isn’t that what a fucking cable company does?
Why yes it is!
So wait…the Cable company is being forced to carry…(essentially) a cable company?
What the fuck?
Think about it…there’s no reason for Fox to have a Fox local now is there?
Fox could broadcast JUST the same way to Cable companies as Discovery does.
But these little local guys were dying and found a way out; pimp out to national brands and flip it to the Cable company at a fraction of the cost for Mr. Fox studio because the Local studio MUST be carried by the Cable company.
So the Fox studio doesn’t have to pay the Cable company that MASS contract they would otherwise pay.
Right…avoid the monopoly though FCC…keep telling yourselves that.
All for the “free market”…bullshit.
All you (FCC) are doing is screwing over my consumers by forcing me to take it up the ass.
Fuck’em all.
I hate local stations.
If you want local, get an antenna.
It’s fricken dumb as hell that they are some kind of forced bastard child.
They don’t even give a shit about their viewers.
We call various local studio’s when we see that their feed is jacked up all the time.
If our feed is jacked up…it’s fixed within hours…AT THE MOST; usually it’s minutes.
Local?
Fuck…I’ve seen them go MONTHS jacked up because they are waiting on some guy out of state to “get around” to getting to them and fixing their issue.
OR, they don’t WANT to have the guy come to fix it until fiscal roll-over because the engineer is too expensive…wtf!?
Seriously…I’ve seen them blatantly state that.
Yet WE get all the shit from consumers…not them.
And WE have to suck-wind on money shelling out credits to people that bitch for this kind of crap, meanwhile the local pays JACK SHIT for NOT doing their job and providing quality of service.
WTF?!
Not at all.
Like I said, “at least $150”.
So not counting transit time is fine because that’s just tallying the lowest price for a simple replacement of a splitter on your line (or flipping some damn idiots TV to channel 3 that couldn’t follow directions over the phone).
That doesn’t tally the cost of installs or cases where full drop line replacements are done, etc…
So it’s about on par…for something like 60 tech’s…the spending cost will be between 200 to 350 thousand dollars a day.
That means there’s a shit connection somewhere in those lines under that front panel.
Considering it’s a vizio, I wouldn’t be surprised if the connections are hot-glued instead of soldered.
Either way, something is lose, frayed, or crossed.
As much as it sucks…call a TV repair man; have him come over and show him that.
(If he’s worth a shit) He’ll know immediately what’s wrong.
My personal opinion is to do the following:
Go to Sears and ask them what company they use as their TV Repair technician service.
Get that information and call them yourself, find out their rates, and see about having them come out…also ask how long they have been doing TV repair and how many technicians they have.
You want to know two things:
how much field experience they have
that they aren’t so large that they will send you idiot greenhorn dumbass johnny.
Should be less than 10 employees (the fewer, the better) if they are solid.
And you want 10 to 15 years of service experience (not “combined”…that’s a bunch of shit as 10 employees that have been working for 1 year each is 10 years “combined”).
Yeah, so all of that bullshit pretty much needs to be changed.
Besides, the FCC makes rules for what studios can and can not air, in what context, in what time slots and they can slap down fines accordingly. You’re basically just trading one group that could act arbitrarily to decide what studios can or cannot do for another.
Either way, every studio still has to operate within certain confines, so there’s no fundamental difference. The only real difference that I can possibly see would be political in nature to the extent that the cable company might not carry a studio that is anti-whateverthecablecompany’sagendais. Even in that sort of scenario, though, public demand could still reasonably force the cable company to cave and carry that studio’s programming.
That’s probably a mistake. I’d find it hard to believe that Cable is or ever was a utility in terms of basic necessity.
In terms of public necessity, I don’t really think that anything is absolutely necessary, but even if something could be argued as being absolutely necessary, should cable really be anywhere on that list?
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but with the Local Incumbent Rule, that only actually applies to local phone service, right? In other words, the Local Incumbent is going to get what they would have been paid by the consumer anyway (which is probably a regulated amount in some regard) so they don’t necessarily feel compelled to offer the best Long-Distance or International Rates. As a result, another company could come in and charge the same amount for local service as what they have to pay the Local Incumbent, but beat the Local Incumbent’s prices for long-distance and International, and still be profitable, is that about right?
Assuming that’s the case, and that what can be charged for local phone service is regulated by something, I don’t really see too much of a problem with that. The competition is still there in terms of Long-Distance, International, Calling Features (and prices thereof), it’s just a matter of whether the Non-Incumbent wants to charge more for local (and risk not getting the customer) or just go ahead and break-even on that aspect, right?
I think the problem with asking Satellite about the lack of an a la carte option (and why they haven’t done it to the fullest extent) is probably because the FCC would roll in and prevent it because Cable could not possibly (by regulation) follow suit and would end up being deemed as impossible to compete with Satellite. So, what’s the point in Satellite investing the resources into doing that if the FCC is just going to turn around a year or so later and tell them to stop doing it, because they sure as Hell aren’t going to just change Cable’s ridiculous regulations, that’d make too much sense.
I can understand why Cable would be seen that way. It’s probably the only outlet that can quickly be taken over and utilized by the Government to get such a message out. One could argue that an automated phone message (outgoing) could do such a thing, but:
1.) Most people would just hang up.
and
2.) They haven’t built the Auto-Dialer powerful enough to handle that, and would probably never have any other reason to do so.
In any case, though, Cable will probably get to the most people simultaneously, unless the Government somehow comes up with a way to usurp Internet connections. Although, I’m not sure if any study has been done as to whether a greater amount of Americans (at a given time) are watching TV or on the computer…
I just think they should come to a point with local studios where they force the Cable companies to continue to carry the local studios that already exist, but make the local studios otherwise on their own. That way, if one drops off it doesn’t have to be replaced or artificially propped up by anything.
Those with really good News broadcasts and a few local interest shows with decent viewership might survive, either that, or they would try to get exceptionally creative to actually generate, “True,” local interest in the network. I’m talking about shows interviewing prominent local businesspeople, local politicians, investigative shows, expanded local sports coverage and things like that. I’d probably watch most of it, so it becomes a question of cost effectiveness. Fortunately, everything I mentioned with the exception of local sports coverage probably wouldn’t really cost too much of anything, so then you have to get local businesses (and possibly national businesses, if you know the right phone number) on board to advertise.
Anyway, some would survive in the cold, harsh world, and the ones that don’t…fuck 'em.
Why can’t you just pass the buck where the buck belongs and give them the local station’s contact info?
Sylvania, my Mom told me Vizio’s are shit. I didn’t even want one of the stupid LCD HDTV’s in the first place because I don’t trust them, but they don’t sell new consoles anymore…
I’m not going to pay for a TV repairman for it, unless you think that it will eventually do that thing forever. It’s really not worth it to pay a TV repairman, and then I also run the risk of it being someone I knew from High School, and that’s another one of my former idiot friends with my fucking contact information…perfect!
So, I’m probably just going to deal with it. Although, I know what a loose, frayed or crossed line looks like, so I’ll probably just check it out myself. If it’s loose or crossed, I can probably fix it, but if it is frayed, it might be difficult to determine exactly what I must replace it with.
That pretty much sums it up.
Too bad the damn FCC can’t.
That’s what really needs to be changed; we don’t actually NEED the FCC anymore.
All we need, if anything, is a council of corporations like HDMI is.
Not even remotely.
Pretty much.
Long distance doesn’t make that much (because that may be routing through another long distance company than the local provider - usually is); features definitely don’t.
Phone, in general, isn’t a huge money maker to begin with.
The money is when you are the long distance provider and pimp out to all the other companies that need long distance for their companies.
The price of the local phone service itself is the largest win in phone short of doing that.
But that’s only if you own the line.
For Cable that means going through coax for digital phone.
That way you don’t have to pay the incumbent because you aren’t using copper pair.
Pass the buck how?
We can’t fine them.
We could take them to court, but it’s not like they pay a monthly rate that you tack on late fees to.
They sign contracts (really dirt cheap contracts) that are good for X time frame, just like everyone else.
Cable Co’s don’t call up HBO and demand money for jacking up True Blood.
Actually; I don’t even think there’s a protocol for doing that other than a lawsuit.
The difference is the length of time that the locals have issues.
We can say that we aren’t going to offer credit for something that isn’t our feed, but the broadcaster; sure. And we do for things that are one single show on one single channel.
But when it’s the MLB on Fox Local for the third week in a row clipping scores and inning markers off because they aren’t sending the metadata information in their feed over to our head end so that it formats right…we start having to give out a few bucks here and there.
I can definitely understand that, but there must be some money in the whole thing, or there wouldn’t be so many providers that still provide long-distance/local on the Local Incumbents copper pair.
Digital phone is pretty cool, anyway. I actually get that through Comcast as well.
When I say pass the buck, I mean give the local Affiliates phone number to the people doing the bitching, so that they can ring their phone off the hook and bitch them into taking prompt action.
I know, but it’s their fault, so have the customers call and bitch-out the local affiliates and tell the customers you aren’t giving them anything for something you didn’t do.
Actually; there aren’t.
Most have moved to coaxial digital phone to avoid the issue.
And where you do have it, it’s either a small company that’s just acting like the are a full provider but piggy-backing someone else’s networks, or (the all more common) they do it by forcing a bundle pack to the option.
That’s actually one of the originating reasons for cable companies forcing bundles in the first place; to get more off of that phone line that they originally were stuck using copper for.
And we know how much those bundles rock right?
Again…thank the FCC for forcing markets to get “creative” in ways to make back money lost meeting FCC regs.
Oh, we do.
I love it when they tell people that they are fine, that we are lying, and that it’s our fault.
Recently this happened with Fox Local and that format issue I mentioned.
It was fun.
Because when the customer’s called back about the issue telling me I was wrong and lying because they just got off the phone with Fox, I just gave them the Wikipedia page that had an article on Fox’s decision to not broadcast in 4:3 format and use their own special meta data codex that everyone had to run just for their station (which the local folks didn’t have sending from their feed)…counter to the FCC’s hazard against doing that (basically gave the FCC the finger).
Exactly the problem I had with Verizon. The fact that they shut off land-line service at a place where the cell didn’t get reception when my wife was pregnant for a bill that wasn’t actually late didn’t positively influence my opinion of them.
I had a current (otherwise 100% paid) bill that was due on such-and-such a Wednesday that I paid by phone on such-and-such a Tuesday. Wednesday at noon my phone was shut off because (their excuse) it takes forty-eight hours to process the payment and my payment is actually late as of 12:00p.m. on the due date.
After assuring me that my service would be restored in no greater than forty-eight hours; they finally got it back on the following Tuesday.
) what shows exist in the “world” and what shows won’t.
