Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts was named one of the 20 most influential people in the NFL earlier this week by Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal (
check out the whole list here).
It’s unfortunate, because the Cold, Hard Football Facts show that his company is little more than a digital prison rapist, forcing its captive customers to suffer with Triassic Period technology that he refuses to upgrade into a true consumer-friendly model.
Like millions of football fans, the Cold, Hard Football Facts crew awoke one morning several weeks ago to find that we no longer had the NFL Network in our cable TV package. Poof! One day it was gone.
“WTF!!!! is up with that?!” is the natural reaction anytime you wake up to find something missing from your home.
So we called Comcast, to find that the NFL Network had been moved – without our request, approval or knowledge – to something called Comcast’s “sports package.”
The move to the “sports package” not only pissed off Comcast customers, it skewered the NFL Network which, according to the Sports Business Journal, lost 20 percent of its subscribers and nearly $5.6 million per month because of the decision. Clearly, Roberts got the attention of the league.
That's not power. That's blackmail. But it's also a prime example of Comcast's digital prison rape business model in action:
- We didn’t ask for the “sports package.”
- We didn’t want the “sports package.”
- We didn’t need the “sports package.”
- We didn't want to pay for the "sports package."
- We were quite happy with the "old package."
But happy customers are meaningless in the communistic, uncompetitive world of cable TV ... and in the digital prison rape business model. Comcast simply shoved the "sports package" up our ass.
As far as we can tell, the only thing we get with the “sports package” that we didn't have before are 87 college sports stations broadcasting near-beer events like women’s hockey and intramural flag football. But if we wanted the NFL Network, we had to buy all of these stations as part of the "sports package."
Naturally, this collection of new stations we don’t want costs more than the old collection of stations we do want!
These force-fed cable TV packages represent the Dark Ages of digital technology in an era when customized music and videos can be downloaded in seconds from out of netherness onto a three-ounce cell phone, or when unmanned remote control robots can prowl battlefields or pull soil samples from the farthest reaches of the solar system.
Comcast obviously has the ability to give you an a la carte selection of the stations you do want. You go to a homepage menu on your TV and pick the stations you'd like to watch. Simple and convenient.
But in Comcast's digital prison rape business model, in their fiber-optic Folsom prison of pigskin, in their gridiron gulag of customer disservice, they force 10 stations up your ass when one would do.
... And then force you to pay more for the honor.
... And then watch as the current gangleader of this corrupt system builds his influence over the nation's most powerful sports league.
