Fuck Spectrum and Disney
Image credit: Joe Daly
I subscribe to both Spectrum for cable television and ESPN for additional programming. You know where this is going.
These two corporate monstrosities are each charging rubes like me for services that they have now suspended and pointing the finger at each other while converting their paid subscribers into the corporate equivalent of human shields. Take your pick as far as sites discussing the pissing contest, but it seems that Spectrum is balking at paying access fees to Disney and their refusal to pay has led to Disney yanking its channels from their services - like ESPN, ABC and other networks. Mind you, Spectrum has advertised ESPN, ABC and the other networks as included in the packages they sell to subscribers. If the price goes up, they shouldn’t have the legal luxury of basically saying, “Hey, we know you paid us for this thing here but if we keep our word and provide it to you, we won’t make as much money as we’d like, so eat shit.”
As each company kicks sand at the other, encouraging their paying customers to take it up with the other (the equivalent of, “Don’t blame me - it was your father’s idea!”), nowhere in the discussion is any mention of making subscribers whole. Like, “We understand that users no longer have access to all of the services advertised so until the dispute is resolved, users get 20% off" their next bill,” or something.
The most pernicious part of it all is the timing — Disney yanked ESPN just before the college football season started on Thursday night after Spectrum failed to pony up the access fee. Suddenly, Charter subscribers (the company that owns Spectrum) in L.A., San Diego, New York, Dallas and other major hubs, lost the ability to watch the college football kickoff. There’s apparently a tennis tourney this weekend that is being carried by ESPN but no dice for the Spectrum faithful. Same for the Formula1 Grand Prix coming up this weekend - another steaming cup of “Fuck You.”
Rumors — perhaps bargaining tactics and perhaps not — have emerged that this isn’t like your average blackout. These have happened before and after the point is made via removal of programming, things have tended to get fixed pretty quickly. The fact that they waited until a moment when the largest percentage of users would be tuning in to their service to disconnect it, suggests a cancerous depravity in the hearts of these companies unlike anything we’ve seen in this area. They’re both trying to harness the power of the press and subscribers to shame the other into submission but neither side is cracking. So when you read in the Washington Post that this outage could go on for a very long time — perhaps even permanently — it’s not so readily accepted as manipulative bluster.
I’m hopeful that the tsunami of resentment gathering on social media forces a quick resolution. But if there’s no relief by Tuesday, I will one hundred percent look into a new cable service.