Sky’s the limit
I love the way marketers try to make bad news sound like they’re doing you a favour. Sky TV’s letter announcing yet another price-hike is a piece of disingenuous smarm: “…our mission is to provide you with the best possible entertainment value. We try to hold your subscription as low as possible, while at the same time improving our programme offering to you.” As if the customer inconvenience of renumbering all its channels (arbitrarily, as far as I can tell) wasn’t enough, Sky runs on mongrel technology, so it’s hard to see how a $2.75 rise for the movie package plus Arts channel will be an improvement (the price last went up by $2.45 in May 2006). The MySky errors Fiona at PA has pointed out aren’t limited to PVRs. The current glitch on Sky Digital infuriatingly flicks from a booked programme to the Weather Channel. But at least it doesn’t do what the previous SkyGlitch did, and bump the volume up to full blast and remove all your booked programmes! Sky tries to justify “passing on some costs” to the subscriber by announcing the introduction of a Crime and Investigation Channel, which (judging by the way Discovery and NatGeo have deteriorated in the last two years) will no doubt turn out to be a “one-stop shop” for re-runs of CSI, Frost, Midsomer Murders and Poirot. It may finally be time to say goodbye to Sky.
posted by Chris Bell at 5:27 PM
4 Comments:
The thing that REALLY gets my goat is the blatent "we are a monopoly so there is nothing you can do about it so BAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" attitude that comes through in every aspect of our dealings with Sky: Let us enumerate:
Crappy service.
Poor and disinterested customer help.
Misleading (I suspect deliberately sharp) billing system.
Arbitrary price rises with a lip service to customers.
And worst of all,
Subscription "Plans" that are blatently designed entirely around Sky's desire to maximise revenue and minimise customer choice except at a high cost.
We got Sky mainly for the cricket and rugby. One second after the RWC is over Sky is gone, gone, gone from our household.
One of my I.T. colleagues at work reckons he has an application that cracks the UHF algorithm, I will investigate that and will enjoy great satisfaction if i can get it to work at home.
> Subscription "Plans" that are
> blatently designed entirely
> around Sky's desire to maximise
> revenue and minimise customer
> choice except at a high cost.
That's it precisely, Sanctuary. It Why can't you mix-and-match exactly the channels you want and leave out the rest? The only time I ever watch E! 'Entertainment' or Fox 'News' is when I'm channel surfing on my way through the increasingly interminable number of crap channels to something else.
I hope their customers abandon them in droves.
And having spent last night watching Sky digital with my dear old Mum, I have another question which is vexing me greatly. Why, in a subscription service, does Sky have ad breaks??? For crying out loud, I'm already PAYING Sky a King's ransom for a dozen of their excreable channels that I don't want to get the 3-4 that I do, so why do I have to be subjected to maddening ad breaks every 10 minutes to tell me what is coming up on Food TV at 10pm? I DON'T CARE!!
I suspect its all padding in an unsuccessful attempt to cover the thinness of their content.
I had Sky- Until the so and sos decided to do everyone a favour and put the Warriors games from Sky 1 to Sports 2- The upshot of which is that about 47,000 customers are forced to upgrade if they want it! $34 to $61 per month for UHF, $47 to $61 for basic digital customers. And the icing on the cake...? As of writing, with less than a month to go to the season start, the affected customers STILL HAVE NOT been told! That is disgraceful, and I'm am doing everything in my power to get them busted for this atrocious behavior. The simple fact is they know many can't afford or won't upgrade, so it's their way of milking a bit of extra before the **** hits the fan.
Final Straw for me, they are gone and I will never be a customer again.
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