Access- New HDTV channels for Yorkton, Melville, Weyburn and others...

[accessdigital]

Access Communications Launches New High Definition Channels

"2005/12/12 - Access Communications Launches New High Definition Channels
Access Communications announced today the launch of 5 additional High Definition channels into their regional systems across the province. The five additional HD channels will round out the co-operative’s already popular HD package which has been available to Access’ digital customers for over a year.

TSN, CTV, CBC, CBS (East) and NBC (East) will be available as of December 15, 2005 in Yorkton, Melville, Weyburn, Estevan and North Battleford.

"This is another example of our customer’s requests leading the charge," says Rick Fraser, Vice President, Marketing for the locally-owned co-operative. "We have had numerous requests from our customers for more high definition channels, and with the recent upgrades to our infrastructure across the province, we are now able to fulfill those requests and provide our customers with a well rounded package." He added the co-operative was interested in getting TSN and CBC in HD in particular because of their comprehensive sports coverage. TSN will broadcast the World Junior Hockey Championship in high definition in its entirety this year on TSN HD.

With the addition of the five new high definition channels, Access Communications now offers 12 HD channels including FOX Seattle, NBC Seattle, ABC Detroit, CBS Seattle, PBS Buffalo and SportsNet and Movie Central. The price of the HD package will remain unchanged at $5.95 per month.

Access Communications Co-operative Limited is the 7th largest cable television provider in Canada. It also provides Internet and wireless cellular services to subscribers across Saskatchewan.

A 100% Saskatchewan-owned non-profit co-operative, Access has a mandate to reinvest 100% of its earnings back in the communities it serves. Combined, the cable company has over 400 employees and volunteers serving 31 communities including Regina, Yorkton and area, Estevan, Weyburn, North Battleford and area, and Meadow Lake. "

[Neild]

Hopefully they don't forget about the city of Regina with the eastern feeds.

Since last spring, we've only been getting the Western feeds, which means you have to stay up past 1 AM to watch E.R. or past 2:30 AM to watch David Letterman.

[Neild]

I just noticed this:

"the co-operative was interested in getting TSN and CBC in HD in particular because of their comprehensive sports coverage"

That's kind of an exagerration. TSN-HD is somewhat OK, but not what I'd call 'comprehensive'. Most of their programming is unconverted low-def.

And CBC-HD has precious little 'comprehensive' sports. Other than the grey cup and one hockey game a week, that is the total HD programs on CBC-HD in an average week.

[accessdigital]

Originally Posted by Neild

Hopefully they don't forget about the city of Regina with the eastern feeds.

Since last spring, we've only been getting the Western feeds, which means you have to stay up past 1 AM to watch E.R. or past 2:30 AM to watch David Letterman.

Oh, i thought Regina had these already- thats odd because usually Regina is the first to get new additions to Access before the rest of Sask. We still dont have GLOBAL HD and DISCOVERY HD.

[Neild]

Originally Posted by accessdigital

"TSN, CTV, CBC, CBS (East) and NBC (East) will be available as of December 15, 2005 in Yorkton, Melville, Weyburn, Estevan and North Battleford.

"This is another example of our customer’s requests leading the charge," says Rick Fraser, Vice President, Marketing for the locally-owned co-operative.

Well it's Dec 18th, and still no sign of these eastern feeds. I'll be amazed the day Access actually keeps a promise or a deadline.

[accessdigital]

Originally Posted by Neild

Well it's Dec 18th, and still no sign of these eastern feeds. I'll be amazed the day Access actually keeps a promise or a deadline.

Really? I got the new HDTV channels on Dec. 15th, right in the morning.

[Neild]

Originally Posted by accessdigital

Really? I got the new HDTV channels on Dec. 15th, right in the morning.

TSN, CTV, and Global East are there, as they have been for several months.

But the NBC East and CBS East feeds we were promised back in June still aren't up.

Why are they stalling on restoring time shifting in Regina? It's a lot bigger market than the other places, it should have approximately equal treatment.

[accessdigital]

Originally Posted by Neild

TSN, CTV, and Global East are there, as they have been for several months.

But the NBC East and CBS East feeds we were promised back in June still aren't up.

Why are they stalling on restoring time shifting in Regina? It's a lot bigger market than the other places, it should have approximately equal treatment.

No idea, but im excited that they got these new channels because im finally getting a HD-TV for christmas then renting the HD PVR, so now i have 12 HD networks for my new tv.

[Neild]

As long as you are OK with the many scheduling, provider, and other glitches, HD-PVR is way to go.

Book some time off from life, because when you have HD signal and a good HDTV together, you'll find yourself watching everything because it looks so good. Even the dumbest programs will have you staring for an hour.

[ChiaJesus]

Originally Posted by Neild

Why are they stalling on restoring time shifting in Regina? It's a lot bigger market than the other places, it should have approximately equal treatment.

Agreed. The lack of time shifting is really bugging me. It's easy to record the shows that are on too late for me but that really screws things up. It then seems that I'm watching Tuesday's shows on Wednesdays.

On a whole I'm disappointed at the lack of HD content. From what I understand it's not necessarily Accesscomm's fault but it still bugs me.

[Neild]

Originally Posted by ChiaJesus

Agreed. The lack of time shifting is really bugging me. It's easy to record the shows that are on too late for me but that really screws things up. It then seems that I'm watching Tuesday's shows on Wednesdays.

On a whole I'm disappointed at the lack of HD content. From what I understand it's not necessarily Accesscomm's fault but it still bugs me.

I can't imagine whose fault it would be other than Access Communications?

One of the top officials told me last June he'd have the time shifting on by 'late summer' of 2005. I might assume he's just seeing this warmer winter as a 'late summer' except it's pretty much standard at Access to overpromise and under-deliver.

If you have HD and a PVR rental, you no doubt have a good sized cable bill, and you have a much higher profit margin than the mainstream customer. Don't you deserve a better HD offering for your money? Bell is the same or less $ and they have 28 HD channels.

Cost should not be a consideration since Access (whose mandate is supposed to be non-profit?) raked in a cool $28 (I think?) million last year. I'd humbly suggest they could invest a mill or two of that into better HD?

Besides just being the right thing to do, it would also be good business. They are losing customers galore this holiday season because almost every store selling TV gear was telling people Bell is the better HD choice. Granted some of these stores have a vested interest. But that factor aside it's sadly true.

These new owners of HD ready gear are Bell customers now, locked in for 2 years or possibly longer. Access shoots themselves in the foot when they sit idly by and let these high margin customers leave due to their lacklustre HDTV and promotional efforts.

And even if you don't agree with my financial points of discussion, something Access could have done for FREE last July was to simply choose the eastern feeds, not the western feeds. Then customers could PVR prime-time shows early and watch them in real time or when they get home instead of having prime time run til past 1 AM.

What's sad #1 is they knew about this option last June and they still fumbled it.

What sad #2 is I spoke to the person who makes the decision about which feeds to carry and he had no clue himself which ones he picked or why.

What's sad #3 is they've had 7 months to rectify this and haven't done so.

What's sad #4 is their PR and support staff are still dishing out misinformation about the feeds and time shifting.

I'm not going to go on with the examples but just seeing this guide problem drag on from week to week reminds me of so many missed opportunities for Access to be a better cable company but they just don't seem to care.

All Access needs to do is touch base with the guide provider and remap Discovery HD on their guide. The guide service is already paid for through your subscription so it would be a zero cost fix.

I guess there's a possibility Discovery-HD themselves aren't providing guide data but I think other DHC people said they got a guide update on the weekend.

[Neild]

Originally Posted by ChiaJesus

Agreed. The lack of time shifting is really bugging me. It's easy to record the shows that are on too late for me but that really screws things up. It then seems that I'm watching Tuesday's shows on Wednesdays.

On a whole I'm disappointed at the lack of HD content. From what I understand it's not necessarily Accesscomm's fault but it still bugs me.

Don't forget to set the 'save until manually erased' option on your recordings though. It will auto-delete recordings after 2-3 days if you don't have that set.

[ChiaJesus]

The fact that people are voicing their opinion with their feet might be enough to wake people up at Access Comm. Even I, a staunch Access Comm subscriber for decades, have started to look elsewhere for service. In fact, just the other day my girlfriend and I were looking at the ExpressVu service and what they had to offer. While it seems that the initial investment is a little more than I'm willing to pay right now (just bought a house and a Mexican vacation coming up) when the finances settle down in the future it's something I'm definately going to seriously consider.

Although I'm new to these forums I have read several of your posts. One that really stood out was the amount of money that we're paying is not in line with other cable providers in the country. If my memory serves me right, you had mentioned that other cable providers are charging ~ $8.00/month for the 6412 whereas we're paying $15. Not to mention the "double dipping" charges where a subscriber has to subscribe to a certain tier to get Discovery and then subscribe to the HD tier in order to get Discovery-HD. This alarms me. In typical sheep fashion I've just been blindly paying my cable bill month after month but after reading several posts on here it dawned on me that, "Access Comm is supposed to be a non-profit co-operative." Something isn't adding up here. If what you say above is correct (that Access raked in $28 million last year) then I definately think it's time to start seeing drastic improvements in both the quality of service and the cost model.

[Neild]

I can't remember the specifics of cost comparisons. I have noted in general Star Choice & Bell have increased their prices since I did that ranting and Access has not changed their price.

One key factor is Access has a chronic case of 'denial-itis'. They believe their own fluff and it's really hard to break through to them. I think the employees get full cable privileges for free as part of their benefits package, so they don't have a remotely realistic sense of the value-for-money part of their business. I will admit right here and now if I was getting free cable my expectations would be a lot different than they are paying $1,800/year.

There are many examples, but one that comes to mind is that til just a few years ago they believed that 'everyone loves the sigma box'. I heard this time and again from their honcho's. Even though you could ask 100 customers and 100 of them would say they hated that thing, Access figured it was their gift to the people and customers loved it. Why? Well because they always had people waiting and begging to get a box. They failed to understand that people only wanted the box so they could watch the scrambled programs of course! And the boxes were always malfunctioning and in short supply.

Or look at their billing. The bill you get next week will cover you until March. And they continue to deny that is 'billing in advance'. If you don't pay, in February you will get a big red stamp on your bill saying you are past due. They look, smell, and act like a utility, but refuse to bill like a utility. If you challenge their management about that they will claim 'Cable TV is like an apartment, you rent it for the month ahead, that's not really 'in advance' cause you're using it the whole month'. It's these kind of things where they are totally out of touch with how the average normal person thinks.

So saying all that the point I'm getting to is recent years I'm not sure they would have noticed people 'voting with their feet'. I suspect during the years they've been losing high-value customers to other services, that's also when all those free American satellite dishes went offline. So the number of customers leaving was probably offset by former grey-dish people subscribing. With denial-itis in place, they are probably taking credit for these new subscribers unfortunately and feeling like they have no motive to improve or try harder.

It's possible the aggressive subsidized SaskTel max might get their attention that competition is for real.

It would be great if someone from there took an interest and could provide some accuracy and context to these kind of discussions actually. How many subscribers are there, how many have left, etc.

I should go back to my research and where I found that $28 million. I think it was from newspaper reports. My guesstimate of their subscriber base is it used to be 80,000 a few years back. It would be interesting to see what it is now that the satellite providers are more competitive.

I think what they are doing with the profits is buying all these rural cable companies and spending the huge profits from Regina subscribers on upgrading all those smaller places to modern technology. I'm not really sure how I feel about that.

I also think they are racing to get the infrastructure in place to allow for telephone-over-cable and alarm monitoring over cable. That's a concept I can support although I wish they would allocate more to HDTV development and get someone involved to really push that forward more.

[ChiaJesus]

FWIW I emailed Access this morning asking them if PPV was available in HD and what the status was of HD timeshifting. This is the reply I got back:

Thank you for your email. The Pay Per View movies are in regular digital format, not HD. We have no immediate plans for HD PPV.

Regarding the timeshifting, our Marketing Department is working on adding new HD channels. Timeshifted channels are among the ones they're looking at, but I don't have a definite timeline or list of new channels. We've had requests for timeshifted HD channels, so please be assured we know how important that is.

I love politically correct "canned" replies.

I'm a little disappointed about PPV. I didn't think that they were available in HD but I was a little surprised to see that there are "no immediate plans" for PPV in HD either. I guess Rogers Video will continue to get the majority of my movie rental money.

Their reply regarding timeshifting should come as no surprise. I just wanted to make my voice known that I too would love to see it happen. Hopefully they just hurry up and git 'er done already.

In the meantime the wait continues....