Circuit City Tries To Cover Up Media Ripping Program

August 5th, 2006 Davis

After the Consumerist published a photograph of Circuit City advertising a DVD burning program, the blogosphere quickly went a buzz about the potential DMCA violations. With the story being both Slashdotted and Dugg, Circuit City quickly responded to the mounting publicity by claiming that the sign was unauthorized and that no such program exists.

In an interview with the Red Herring, Bill Cimino, Circuit City’s Director of Corporate Communications said that “That sign was not an authorized sign, wasn’t issued by the store support center, and the information on the sign is not correct.” The article then goes on to state “only 20 stores in the nation offer the company’s newest copying program, which allows a customer to bring in up to 100 CDs and have the contents transferred to DVD.”

Circuit City can try to deny the existence of this program all they want, but the truth of the matter is that they have been solicitating and accepting orders for the service for over a month through their Get Digital “partnership.” Originally I found out about the service, when Smorty71 received an early email solicitation advertising the service.

If Circuit City wants to take on the wrath of the RIAA that’s fine with me, but for them to come out and deny the existence of this program is a really dumb PR move. At the very least they should have the sense to take down the website advertising the service if they want to deny it. Cimino may claim that this is for up to 100 CDs, but the minimum order online is 50 CDs and they only offer the best 99 cent pricing for orders of 400+ CDs. I can understand why Circuit City would want to back away from this issue, but it’s not right to put the blame for the the controversy on some retail store clerk, when it clearly involves decision makers higher up then that. Who would be stupid enough to ever pay that much for this sort of service is beyond me, but if Circuit City is trying to overcharge customers for a rip and burn service, then they need to open and transparent about what they are doing instead of trying to hide behind some unauthorized sign.

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Disney To Support Net Negativity

August 3rd, 2006 Davis

I often wonder how it can be that I love the internet so much, but hate the people who ultimately bring it to me. Maybe it’s the sweatheart exclusivity deals that cut into consumer choice or the way the networks are able to dictate the terms of the net to their subscribers, but it’s very frustrating to see companies spend millions of dollars buying politicians and then force sub-par programming and services down consumers throats.

Now normally, I take issue with the telecoms and in the recent net neutrality debate, I’ve been more then disappointed to see that none of the telecoms are willing to step up and provide unfettered access to consumers, but today my ire is at Disney for trying to create a net negativity environment with their ESPN 360 website.

Taking a page from the school yard bully who would take their ball and go home if you don’t play by their rules, Disney has launched an initive where they are trying to charge the telecom companies so that consumers have access to their website. Rather then turning their ESPN 360 website into a pay service, Disney wants the telecoms to subsidize their content costs. As a consumer I hope that Disney fails miserably in this effort. I have no problem with them wanting to charge a monthly fee for consumer to access their content, but it should be up to customers who are willing to pay for that to subsidize their content, not the companies that provide access. If Disney is successful in convincing the telecoms to sign off on the scheme, it will set a dangerous precident where consumers will have to pay for website packages instead of buying their web content ala carte. Essentially, it would create a series of internets instead of one network that all consumers have access to.

If Disney wants to take their ball and go home, I say let them. If they think consumers are going to start calling up their cable companies and demanding that we have access to their ESPN 360 site then they are crazy. I hope that more telecoms will see this ploy for what it is and that there is a backlash to Disney for trying something this stupid.

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Comcast & Time Warner Trade Railroads In Real Life Game Of Monopoly

August 2nd, 2006 Davis

The Consumerist scooped the news media tonight when they published an internal memo on a move by Comcast to dissolve a bizarre partnership that they have with Time Warner in Texas. In a deal that had to have involved a night of heavy drinkng and a poker game, Comcast exercised an option that forced this not so tidy divorce. Essentially Comcast was given the opportunity to create a real life high stakes over/under wager by deciding on how much debt to give each market and then Time Warner had to pick between owning the monopoly on the Houston market or in the Southwest part of the state. From the memo it sounds like Comcast wins Houston. While it’s still too early to know the exact terms of the deal, at first glace it appears that Houston was what Comcast was after the whole time. With Time Warner in liquidation mode and with Comcast in growth mode, they assigned the entire debt load to the Houston market in a sucessful attempt to discourage Time Warner from wanting to take it on. Houston fits Comcast well and should ultimately prove to be a more lucrative market, especially given Comcast’s attempts to get into local programming. I’m sure that there are still a lot of details that have to be worked out and it wouldn’t be a real monopoly if there doesn’t end up being at least a couple of politicians getting paid, but at first glance it looks like Comcast may have been able to get away with trading a get out of jail free card for Shortline Railroad.

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Eleven Fourteen

August 2nd, 2006 Davis

Eleven Fourteen Hosted on Zooomr

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Cingular Hates Their Longtime Customers

August 2nd, 2006 Davis

Everytime I see anything written about Cingular I know that it has to be about how they are screwing someone. This time they have decided that they want to charge an extra $5 per month to long time customers who refuse to upgrade their phone to Cingular’s new system. I will never understand how they became as popular as they did, but I’ve never seen any company consistently try and harass their customers more then Cingular. I’ve been a Cingular customer twice in my life. The first time I was smooth talked into signing up with them, but immedietely began to have problems. Whether it was realizing that I didn’t check the fine print on what nights meant (my night starts a lot earlier than 9pm) or finding out that they prorated my first months bill after the fact (fact my first bill was over $300), lets just say we didn’t start things out on the right foot.

A little over 2 years ago, I wanted to switch from a local carrier in San Francisco to something more reliable and decided to pay a premium to get AT&T Wireless. I wanted a nice phone that didn’t cost me money to use my mp3s, so I picked up the 2 year contract to help subsidize my cost. Of course no sooner did I sign the contract, then Cingular bought out AT&T Wireless for boatloads of money. The entire time I was an AT&T Wireless customer Cingular continually tried to hard sell me on switching to their network, but I kept refusing after seeing what they did to Thomas Hawk when he wanted to use his Audiovox. Maybe this is part of the reason why they have to fine their customers $5 a month for not upgrading their phones, but frankly I think this is a bad move on their part. First they lock you in with long term contracts, then they refuse to let you transfer your phone number until the government makes them and now they want to charge you extra for service, but you can’t transfer your phone to someone else because they’ve intentionally locked down your phone to their network. Something about this just doesn’t seem right about this, I’ll let the class action attorneys sort this one out, but I smell funny money. Ultimately, when I read things like this, it makes me glad that I paid a little bit extra to buy an unlocked phone instead of being held hostage to a bad cell phone company.

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Ice Sculptures Gone Wild

August 2nd, 2006 Davis

This is an absolutely gorgeous sculpture, I bet that the artist that made it was probably terribly depressed after this was filmed. I don’t even have to tell you what happens and I think you’ll be able to guess why this made the front page of Digg. It still exciting to watch even if you know that the inevitable is going to happen.

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Verizon’s Chocolate Leaves Me With Stomach Ache

August 2nd, 2006 Davis

Verizon is out pimping their new phone right now and while I think it’s nice that the Chocolate is going to have a 2GB memory card in it, I think it sucks eggs that they are trying to force people to buy their mp3s for $1.99 just for using their network. This move may actually make Verizon more evil then my telecom nemesis, Cingular. Nevermind that consumers have already paid for their mp3’s by buying the CDs or downloading them from Apple, Verizon seems to feel that you should still have to pay them something, just so you don’t have to carry around an iPod and a cell phone. Verizon can try and make the chocolate seem as cool as they want, but I’ll never buy into that scheme. If you pay for music once, it shouldn’t matter whether you want to use your media at home, on the go or in your car. Given what their terms and conditions say about placeshifting, I guess I shouldn’t really be all that surprised that Verizon would adopt such a bogus policy.

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Davis 1 - Comcast 0

August 2nd, 2006 Davis

So over the last two weeks I’ve sort of been at war with Comcast. For as much as I seem to love the internet I sure seem to hate the people who provide me with it. For now I can’t bite the bullet and pay to have them provide me with my internet access and I’ve already tried the phone company and for whatever reason they can’t provide me with DSL without having some tech guy come out on my dime. For the last two weeks I’ve just been doing my best to live without it. Living without net access has been like missing a leg. It’s really funny to think about how much the connectivity of the net has changed my lifestyle, but I’ve really felt out of place not having access to the information superhighway. I was lamenting to Tom about my problems earlier today and he came up with the perfect solution. He suggested that I pick up a wireless access card for my PC and use it to connect to the Google WiFi now that I’m living downtown. I stopped by CompUSA on my way home tonight and picked up generic wireless USB adapter and it works perfectly. Finally I’m back online and I’m using a company that I actually like.

If Google WiFi turns out to be a real solution to my internet needs it could end up saving me at least $400 a year. For now, I’m really pleased with how things turned out, the connection is stable and the speed is fast, but the real test will come when I try and see if I can hook up my TiVo series 3 using the free net access. If I’m able to use Google WiFi and still be able to network my TiVo to my home media, then I’ll be more then happy to tell Comcast to stick with what they do best, maintaining a monopoly stranglehold on my TV.

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