Monday, September 1, 2008

Whine, whine, whine

C: Some time ago you reneged on your obligation to meet the wishes and needs of your customers when you stopped publishing the weekly television schedule. The daily schedule you publish is inadequate, insufficient and incomplete. - R.F.

A: Of course the daily TV schedule is incomplete. With upwards of 500 channels available to cable and satellite subscribers (the vast majority of TV viewers these days), no one can publish a complete guide. Even TV Guide gave up on that.

The problem is: Which 8 percent of the channels would you like us to list? Not a single reader will be satisfied with our selection.

As I have mentioned before, we would be happy to print a weekly guide if it were at all useful to subscribers and advertisers would support it, but as we learned years ago, that's not going to happen. And printing a guide and selling it separately won't work either. We could never recoup the cost of the data, the paper and the printing from the number of copies that could be sold.

3 comments:

Brant said...

Not to mention the fact that anyone who has cable or satellite television has on-screen program listings. My satellite system also allows me to customize my channel menu so that I only see the ones I generally watch, and it's very easy to sift through the program directory. It's certainly not worth anyone's while to print a television guide for the 5 percent of the populace (I'm estimating)still getting television signals through antennas or rabbit ears. And if you're using those means to get your television signals, you only have a handful of channels to worry about, anyway. And, you'll soon need a special box just to continue getting that reception. It's time to climb into, at least, the late 20th century.

Anonymous said...

Go buy a TV Guide and stop your bitching!

I can't believe how petty some of the complaints are that you receive.

Have a nice day-

Anonymous said...

Trust me -- I have only 13 channels, and there's crap on 10 of them.