I recently got a cable TV package when I switched my service and decided to try it out. Mind you, I never watch TV and haven’t watched it regularly since I was a kid. After playing around with the service for a few minutes I became convinced that the product is faulty and here is why.

  1. There are over 500 channels listed, and I only have access to around 50. This is fine in itself, but there is no way to determine if I have access until I try to view the channel. There is no option to filter out the channels that are inaccessable
  2. There is no way to search through the shows except manually. Scrolling through pages upon pages of listings just to find one thing to watch is extremely tedious, especially when trying to relax.
  3. Once I finally found a show, I had to watch it from somewhere in the middle. Why is it starting halfway through? Wait, I need an additional, expensive piece of equipment to fix this? Bad business. Sell a broken product, and then sell another product which fixes the original flaws.
  4. Commercials are far too long, I have to watch about 5 minutes of commercials for each 20 minutes of show. There is something wrong with this.
  5. Overpriced. I’m paying ~$25 / month for this service with all these failings and I still have to watch commercials.

How can such a service compete with the likes of Hulu, youtube, megavideo and sidereel? I suppose it will die off as soon as people realize how broken it is.