Lazy Man and Money

Semi-Annual Subscriptions Review: Ooma and Comcast Policies Stand Out

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Every 6 months, I like to review my subscriptions and make sure that things are what I expect them to be. Ideally, I would do this more often, but I’m Lazy, right? In the course of looking through my subscription expenses yesterday, I came across two that weren’t what I expected. It wasn’t just that, but each company’s policy stood out as something that I thought I should warn readers of.

Let’s start off with Ooma. A while back, I wrote about how Ooma gives us free lifetime phone service for $150. (Free doesn’t apply to taxes and federal service fees, which amount to around $3 a month for us.) That’s a tremendous deal. When does the deal start to lose its luster? It’s when Ooma automatically enrolls you into their Premier plan for $9.99 a month. I was careful not select any premier services when I signed up. Still, I was put on this plan without my knowledge (there may have been a small mention in the fine print somewhere). The really shady thing that Ooma does? They give you a 60-day free trial of it and then start charging you. So for the first couple of months, I was paying the $3 thinking that I was saving some big dollars over my $17 Vonage plan. In the third month, the trial ended and I was charged $13 negating much of my savings. I didn’t catch this for a few months. Shame on me for not checking my bill earlier. At the same time, it is pretty sneaky of Ooma to put someone in a Premier plan when they explicitly chose not to add those features to their account.

A quick call to Ooma had someone answer the phone promptly and they refunded me two months of charges. That was at least a pleasant customer service experience.

Next up, Comcast. I noticed that I had been put in a Digital Preferred package that was costing me $18 a month. It was a bunch of channels that I don’t watch. I was surprised to find a couple of months ago that I got the NFL Network, which I thought was on a higher tier. Shame on me for not realizing this. I’m not sure how it got added to my account, but there’s a reason why I didn’t watch those Thursday night games on the NFL Network last year, I had canceled it in the past. Again, shame of me for not realizing it.

I decided to call Comcast to get it removed. Navigating through the Comcast phone tree on a Sunday brought me to a menu where I could press 2 to upgrade my service or 3 to downgrade my service. I pressed 3 and they said that there was no one in the office that could help with it because it wasn’t during their business hours. I called back and this time selected 2 to upgrade my plan. Sure enough, they have staff on the phone working Sunday for something that will increase their revenues. I asked the representative to remove the service and to Comcast’s credit he did.

One more thing that I found when looking at my Comcast bill… I’m supposed to get HBO for free (they have it added and then subtracted out as some kind of promotion). Unfortunately my Windows Media Center with CableCard says that I don’t have an HBO subscription. It’s probably a CableCard issue. One thing I’ll need to keep an out for though is when that promotion expires. That will trigger a $20 charge for a channel that I clearly don’t watch. (However, once I get it working, I’m going to DVR everything in sight and save it to my 3 terabyte hard drive.)

6 Comcast Secrets… Some of Them Dirty

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A week ago, I stopped receiving some of the channels that I pay for on Comcast. The local affiliates for NBC and CVS showed a status code of “S0a00.” The “fix” was to unplug the HD DVR box and plug it back in. Essentially this is rebooting the operating system. I’m technology-minded, makes sense. The same problem occurred yesterday. This time rebooting the system didn’t fix things. This lead me down the rabbit hole to explore a number of things regarding Comcast and my cable service.

  1. There is a secret diagnostics mode – There’s a secret diagnostics mode on the cable box. If you are watching television, press power and then ok/select three times fast. You’ll get a white screen with a number of options. The fourth option for me was the Inband Status. From there I could get the value for “SNR” (Signal to Noise Ratio). From the channels that weren’t comming in the reading was 27 dB. On the good ones it was 33. You want a range between 33 and 37.
    2. [survata]

  2. Replacing the DVR means you lose your shows – The technician that fixing my cable service today saw my old box and said he would upgrade me to a new one as part of the fix. I didn’t have much of a choice. The shows live on the hard drive of the box, and they can’t open up the box and switch out the hard drives. Technologically this is very, very possible, but it seems that Motorola specifically didn’t build the boxes to allow for it as a hot-plugable drives would be fairly easy. My guess is that they were worried people would start using the drives with other hardware than their own, download them, and share them over the Internet.
  3. There is a “black” HD DVR with double the hard drive space… – I asked if the new box I’d be getting would have more space. It’s been four years. The 500GB hard drive that was probably $150 at the time could easily be replaced with a 2TB hard drive, for a cost of around $80 – probably much less with a bulk purchase. The technician mentioned that there’s a “black” HD DVR with double the hard drive space. I asked how I go about getting one and what the upgrade fee would be. He said that you just had to be lucky, its the same cost as the other DVR. I don’t understand the model. It is like buying an iPhone and getting either a 8GB or a 16GB version at random.
  4. You can’t buy a cable box (sort of) – I don’t know if this is really true. I’m still trying to figure it out. I thought there was legislation that made it a requirement for cable operators to sell the boxes instead of renting them. I spent some time searching the web today and I couldn’t find a way to buy a cable box. Mostly people in forums were asking and the answers were that you could try to buy one Ebay, but it most likely stolen and the cable company wouldn’t activate it. The cable companies don’t sell the boxes. The technician mentioned that I could get a Tivo and use a CableCard. That would lock me into Tivo fees though. I bet I’d be giving up the On Demand feature and possibly others. From a technical standpoint, the hardware on the box is probably less than $100 and there is a lot of free DVR software out there. We are paying $192 a year, which adds up.
  5. You can buy a cable modem – You can buy them on Amazon – Motorola Surfboard SB5101 Cable Modem. The $50 investment will pay for itself in about 6 months. It’s one the best, fastest moves you can make to save some easy money. I can’t figure out why I can purchase a cable modem, but not a cable box.
  6. Comcast will have be experiencing Sun Outages soon – While I was waiting to tell Comcast my problem with the service, a recording mentioned that there are planned solar outages. Turns out that twice a year there’s a solar phenomenon that impacts the satellites and causes brief outages for brief periods – 15 minutes or so. This struck me as odd because Comcast is a cable service not satellite. However, in thinking about it in more detail, the stations are routinely broadcast by satellite. This is more of a “huh… I didn’t know that” secret… and it’s not just a Comcast phenomenon.
    7. [/survata]

The research about not being able to buy a cable box, lead me to do quite a bit of research… actually a lot of research. In the next couple of weeks, I will likely expand on this in greater detail. That’s if I have the “Moxi”.

I Saved more than 33% on my Cable Bill! More Savings on the Way?

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Sorry if I sound a little too excited in that title. I’m choosing to looking at the glass as half-full. However, it is quite possible that one could look at the glass as half empty… I was overpaying for my cable for some time. Finally, after writing about trying to cut the cable twice, I am making progress (see: Cutting the Cable TV and Cutting the Cable TV (Part 2))

My cable and Internet bill for May of this year was a whopping $221.91. I use the Internet connection quite a bit. So $48 of that ($43 for the service and $5 for the modem lease), each month is pretty reasonable. That leaves me paying $173.91 for television. That’s a pretty shocking amount since I don’t watch that much television. And the only cable shows that I typically watch are Men of a Certain Age (TNT), Rescue Me (FX), and True Blood (HBO). That seems a lot of money for that, doesn’t it?

It turns out that $44.75 of that bill was for MLB Extra Innings. That allows me to watch Red Sox games from San Francisco. There are only four of those payments a year, but that still comes out to about $180 for the season. We watch a lot of Red Sox games, so we are talking about $158.91 a month for everything else (taking the $180 and pro-rating it over the 12 months = $15 a month). That’s still a lot of money for a few shows.

So I took a trip to the Comcast office to see what I could do about reducing my bill.

Current cost saving measures:

  • Remove HBO – Savings: $19.99/mo. – Sorry True Blood. You are great, but not that great. We the first 4 Sookie Stackhouse books on Paperback Swap, for the cost of postage. I may go over a friend’s house to watch it. I only had HBO because it was free with a previous promotion and I never canceled it. I didn’t realize that True Blood was costing me $4.50 an episode… more if you consider that there are months when I was paying for HBO and True Blood wasn’t airing new episodes.
  • Remove Sports Entertainment Package – $6.95 – The only channel that we watched here is the NFL Network. I woke up early this Sunday and went to turn it on only to remember that I gave it up. I decided to read some articles about the Patriots on the Internet instead… not a big loss there.
  • Remove Digital Preferred Package – Savings: $16.95/mo. – We watched none of the channels here, but it seems like it was a prerequisite for the NFL Network. (For some reason, the Sports Entertainment Package channels are listed in the Preferred Package
  • Unsolicited $30 savings a month – The person at the office said that she could give me $15 off on both my cable and and my Internet service each month for 6 months. I didn’t even have to ask if there was anything they could do.

That’s a total savings of around $59… not bad from a $158.91 start. However, the amazing thing is that there’s more fat to trim from my bill.

Proposed future cost saving measures:

  • Watch MLB.TV through our Media Center – Savings: $5/mo – This is a rare no-brainer. The cost for the Internet version is $119.95, about a savings of $60 from the cable version. It’s a better product as the video feed is better quality (a friend has it and we watched it one time) and you have the freedom to watch it anywhere there is Internet – not just at your home with your cable box. The computer that we set up near our television has an HDMI out which is perfect for steaming HDTV-quality to our television.
  • Switch to Limited Basic – Savings $52/mo – This is the big switch. This is getting rid of most of the cable channels you know and love… ESPN, CNN, MTV, FX, TNT, CNBC, USA, etc. I can catch Men of a Certain Age on TNT’s website (or I could last season). So the other thing that we’d be missing here is the occasional Saturday morning wake up to the Food and Travel channels. I don’t think this is worth $52 a month, but I haven’t been able to fully convince my wife of this. Baby steps for now.
  • Remove DVR service – Savings $8/mo – In order to go to the Limited Basic (see above) we would have to give up the Comcast HD/DVR box and go with a straight HD box. I love DVR, but it’s possible we could use the hard drive space on our media center to serve the same purpose. If any readers have suggestions for products to make this easy to use (especially important for the wife) such as this Hauppauge product or any of these ones, let me know in the comments. I don’t mind a one-time cost that I can recoup over the course of a couple of years.
  • By the HD box and Cable Modem hardware instead of renting them: Savings $13/mo ($8/mo for set-top box, $5 for cable modem) – I’ve been paying $5 for about a bazillion years for this cable modem. I should look to just buy one and own it outright. It looks like the cable modem may be $60 on Ebay, so it would pay for itself for a year. As for the HD box, I see a couple of those on Ebay as well. Perhaps there is a Hauppauge product for that as well. It’s another thing to research.

If I can do all the above, my cable and Internet bill will be $58 a month ($45 for Internet, $13 for basic cable) after a few one-time costs (and of course various fees and taxes). However, at that point, a strong case could be made to give up even basic cable and get HDTV channels that I watch over the air with an antenna for a one-time cost. That would make us completely free of cable television, without changing our viewing habits or the shows we typically watch that much.

Final note: I found that Comcast changed the prices of services without notifying us. For example in May we paid $4.99 for the Sports Entertainment Package, $18.99 for HBO, and $47.95 for cable modem service. In September we paid, $6.95, $19.99, and $49.95 for the three respectively. The just encourages me to cut table television more.

Links: Comcast Outage and NFL Draft Edition

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Yesterday, I woke up excited for the NFL draft. It had been heavily publicized for the last two months. I was disappointed to find that Comcast, my cable television and Internet provider, was experiencing an outage. Right before the draft, they got the television working, but the Internet was down all day. I finally called Comcast late last night to find that when they fixed the outage, the cable modem needed to be recycled. I lost a days worth of work with the Carnival of Personal Finance due out tomorrow because they didn’t tell me to unplug the modem and plug it back in. This solidifies the hate portion of my love-hate relationship with Comcast.

As for the draft itself, it’s been relatively boring. In the past there’s been some drama with a player being stuck in the green room for an excessive amount of time. Yesterday it emptied out in the first hour. As for the Patriots, the team I follow, their draft has been solid, but not the barn-burner that I’ve come to expect the last couple of years. They didn’t trade for an extra first round pick or pick up a Randy Moss/Wes Welker-type star. That said, the Patriots picked up some quality at the positions they needed it. It’s the third round and they traded third round pick for a future 2nd round pick and a fifth round pick. I love when they do this – next year I’ll be very happy when they have two second round picks.

On to the links I liked this week:

Major League Baseball and The Onion of Evil

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I made fairly sizable purchase last Friday. I called up Comcast, my cable operator and said, “Yes, I’d like to sign up for the MLB Extra Innings package.” My wife and I will pay $160 to watch the next six month of our favorite team, the Boston Red Sox from our San Francisco area home. It hurts me to spend money like this. It seems like living in a different location shouldn’t prevent you from seeing your favorite team. Alas, that’s the way things work today and I have to live with it. I imagine that in 5 or 10 years this business model will go the way of music stores like Tower Records.

There are a few options for Major League Baseball fans living away from their favorite teams:

  • Slingbox – We have a Slingbox back home, but there have been lots of technical problems getting it work with Verizon’s FIOS service. It’s partially Verizon having a complicated procedure for adding new televisions and partially the wiring of my friend’s house. It’s at the point where I’ve become too much of a burden to him and have dropped the subject.
  • MLB Extra Innings – This is the way we went. You give the cable operator or DirecTV $160 (or $200 if you don’t get their early bird special) and you get a set of channels with a bunch of baseball games. If you have the Dish Network, you don’t have this option, they weren’t able to reach a deal with Major League Baseball this year.
  • MLB.TV – This is an option for those who want to stream the games over the Internet. One of the pluses is that you can get a monthly subscription rather than buying a whole season. The price is a more reasonable $120 a year. You are reduced to watching it on a computer or hooking up your computer to your TV. However, the biggest negative is that MLB likes to steal your money or at least they liked to steal mine.
  • Streaming P2P services – I’m not sure these are legal and I bet the quality isn’t the best. Still I’ve heard of people using Sopcast and/or TVAnts to watch games. I don’t really consider this an option, but I’m adding it here for completeness.

On Saturday morning my wife and I woke up excited to watch the game while we do a little Spring cleaning (because of the time zone difference, it’s only 10 o’clock). We turn on the TV and go to our new channels and see that they are showing only four of the days 12 games – all starting at 7PM. I think that’s very odd since there were currently 6 or 7 games in progress.

I called up Comcast. It takes me about 20 minutes to explain to two people that I have no service problems, but an issue with the programming (or lack thereof) being offered. I get put on hold for a quite awhile and as the call approaches it’s one-hour mark, they direct me to InDemand’s MLB Extra Innings website. It seems that the program is their issue and not Comcast’s. I buy that, and the Comcast person is nice enough to give me a phone number for their offices. Of course InDemand’s offices aren’t open on the weekend.

I eventually got routed back to Comcast where I found someone who actually watches baseball. This is helpful because I’m fairly sure the other Comcast reps believed no baseball was being played at the time. He found some fine print about the MLB Extra Innings not being able to carry games during Fox’s or ESPN’s Game of the Week. Well, Fox didn’t have game on, so that couldn’t be it. Wait, looking through my TV guide, they are showing a game at 12:30. So that explains it…

Major League Baseball is paid a lot of money by Fox and ESPN to not show the other games at the same time on that service. It’s a fairly stupid thing, but I’ve never once thought, “The Red Sox game isn’t on, I’ll watch the Dodgers/Padres.” I’d guess that few people don’t have that thought either. If people are willing to pay $160-$200 to “follow your favorite teams” and “get access to ALL the hard-hitting, base-stealing action.”, they don’t care about the game of the week.

It’s at this point where I decided to look at the MLB.TV service again. They claim “April – September: WATCH and LISTEN to every regular season out-of-market game” as well as “WATCH every 2008 regular season out-of-market game LIVE or on-demand.” Eureka! So this how I can watch the Red Sox on Saturday and Sunday when they are not the Game of The Week – “every game” means every game right? There are no asterisks or footnote markets next to those claims. Scroll down the screen and in the smallest, lightest gray text they can manage, they mention that the service is subject to the same Fox/ESPN blackout.

At this point, the Red Sox game was nearly over. They were losing 10-2 and my frustration came to a head. I explained the situation to my wife, who can’t get over the fact that we paid $160 for most, but not all of the games that we got for free in Boston. The best I could do is say that Major League Baseball is an onion of bovine excrement – you pull off one layer and there’s another layer beneath it.

Of course as long as they draw such strong feelings from me (and fans like me), they will be able to continue these practices.