Canceling CSTV All-Access Monthly Subscriptions

So with only two home games over the next month and four total, I decided to cancel my subscription to All-Access. As expected, the rebilling on the monthly pass will happen before the end of your 30-day period (this should not be a surprise). My pass was renewed roughly 48 hours before the end of 30 days. When I called to cancel they said they had already billed me and therefore had to issue a refund. The amazingly friendly customer staff (please read with heavy sarcasm) will refund the second month (b/c we all know they already billed us) but you may have to call back a few times. It seems they like to transfer you to no one. Maybe it’s just their marketing, you tell them you would like to cancel and they drop your call. Long story short, after ~10 minutes of calling and recalling, they issued the refund. We’ll have to wait and see if it actually shows up as billed and credited or what. I think I’ll re-subscribe right before the SLU(t) game in January and get the remaining 7 home games and 3 on the road. Has anyone else tried to cancel his or her subscription? Thoughts/comments?

[Q]Thoughts/comments?[/q]
I happily paid for an entire year, because I want to encourage the broadcast of games over the internet, as that's the only way (short of moving to Ithaca or driving *a lot*) I'll get to watch them. Let's face it: Cornell isn't getting a national TV contract anytime soon.

Furthermore, I am practical enough to realize that Cornell is too shortsighted to make the games available for free, regardless of any arguments as to whether it would be better or worse for the University's bottom line. If they haven't figured it out by now, what hope is there that they'll suddenly reach enlightenment just because I refuse to pay for All Access? It's more likely to convince them that there is actually no demand, and not broadcast any video at all. Listening to the away games is torture enough; I don't really want to relive the few years after graduation when I could only watch one or two games a year, in-person.

Hey, maybe if enough people start watching college hockey games over the internet, I'll be able to catch both home *and* away games from the comfort of my couch. IMO, that is worth paying for, regardless of the value of Cornell's incentive equation for free home game broadcasts.

Cheers,
Kyle

I ordered MLB.TV for the last month of the regular season (I'm pretty sure that the MLB.TV and CSTV All-Access billing companies are the same). Wrongly assuming that the subscription wouldn't be automatically renewed after the season, I found a charge for access of all the online archives for the playoff games in October, which weren't allowed to be shown live due to TV rights. After the World Series, I received an email advertising exciting hot-stove and winter league coverage. Reading the fine print, I saw that unless I called or emailed, I would automatically be charged for the riveting off-season package also. Oh boy.

So, to answer your question, I used the email address provided in that email (and nowhere else) to request termination of my subscription. I didn't receive any cancellation confirmation, but I also didn't receive any more charges. I was nervous that calling would produce the experience you've had.

Bump...

A few of us called CSTV during the RPI outage and were told they would look in to some kind of a partial refund or other way to make up for all the trouble we had. He was hopefully we would hear back within a few days. Well, now it's a week and a half later. Has anyone heard back or followed up?

- Fred

This is exactly why I refuse to get the All-Access package. Really its rather shameful that Cornell hired a company who's business practice equal that of porn web sites.

Why all the animus toward CSTV?

(I can understand being pissed about the LynahCam debacle, but if Age is able to keep from continually bitching publicly, you can too. And from my perspective, it is a completely orthogonal issue, having entirely to do with Athletics' anality, not their on-going apathy or any incompetence on the part of CSTV. So, can we agree to temporarily keep the issues separate?)

CSTV clearly has some customer service issues, but their job is very difficult: essentially, they have students with little to no technical knowledge running the on-site boxes encoding the video into a stream and sending it to the entry points for subsequent distribution to viewers.

The problems you see almost all originate at that point: the encoder may be fucked up because the monkey taking it out of the truck dropped it, or because some klutz spilled coffee on it or tripped over a cable, or because Athletics doesn't care enough to provide a facility in which the box will be safe from random shit. There are lots of things that all have to go right, and if even one isn't right, you get bad video or poor quality.

I would be very, very surprised if there were more than 200 subscribers to Cornell All-Access, and most of them didn't buy a year's worth. But let's assume they did: that's $15G/year to divide between Cornell, CSTV, CSTV's streaming provider, and the student running the encoder. Slaves probably get better overall compensation than the pittance they'll receive from that purse. It certainly is nowhere near profitable enough to justify paying a full-time person or even an experienced part-time engineer to run the thing, so you get what you pay for.

If, on the other hand, you want to pay $30/game, and get 1000 of your compadres to do the same, you can probably get CSTV to hire a full-time person to live in central New York and collect $80G/year to do 8 hours of work a week. Since this isn't going to happen, live with the reality that at the current interest and price level, there will be problems.

I'm happy to pay what I'm paying to see the guys play, even with the occasional quality problems, because the only alternative we're about to get from Cornell Athletics is a blank screen. The quality isn't HDTV, but: it is what it is; I accept that; and still derive tremendous enjoyment from it because the alternative sucks so much worse. (I also work in the streaming delivery field, so I know what's possible and what isn't, and what All Access provides is pretty much top-notch when you consider the costs and end-user restrictions involved.)

Despite all that, in addition to CSTV's problems, many problems originate with the viewer who doesn't know any better. Those of you who are seeing quality problems should check your media player settings. As far as I can tell, there are two streams: one at 520 kbps, and another at about half that. Only use the 520 kbps stream if your link's average capacity at the time of the game can support that. That means: run a speed test to find out what the actual capacity of your link is, and don't use a stream near or higher than that capacity!

Secondly, try to increase the buffer duration if you get occasional hangups due to inconsistent link capacity.

Thirdly, make sure there aren't other people trying to use the link at the same time. If you are watching streaming video on a typical residential broadband link (cable or DSL), playing Far Cry at the same time probably isn't the hottest idea.

Finally, if you want full-screen video, the right thing to do is to use the Firefox MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin, which will replace the postage stamp-sized embedded media player with what amounts to a big button that will load the stream into the standalone Windows Media Player. First, install Firefox if you don't have it; and then go to [addons.mozilla.org] to download the plugin. (CSTV could make this easier by providing a link instead of/in addition to embedding a media player, but Microsoft could also make this easier by providing a full screen option in the embedded player; and anyway, there's another solution, so it isn't that big a deal.)

Cheers,
Kyle

[q] Why all the animus toward CSTV?[/q]Oh, come on Kyle. Bad service equals bad customer satisfaction equals complaining. Complaints, threats and actually cancelling service are the only kind of market feedback that might improve things.

I don't really care whether or not they have untrained students running the system. That's their problem. It's their responsibility to provide the service that they have promised. It would be very different if this was a free service provided by Cornell or a volunteers (and I think the reactions were different).

[Q]Finally, if you want full-screen video, the right thing to do is to use the Firefox MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin, which will replace the postage stamp-sized embedded media player with what amounts to a big button that will load the stream into the standalone Windows Media Player.[/Q]

Thanks for the tip. I had no idea it existed. By the lack of any other information on the webpage, am I to assume the plug-in in cross platform? Or does it only work on Windows?


Edit: Found this on the author's webpage:
OSX users : according to bugs 263429 and 267269 you will need to take a DeerPark version of firefox on Mozilla website (waiting the final version 1.5) and use version 0.4.9.4 or above

So, it should work on Mac, just make sure you're using 1.5 (although those bugs were fixed over a year ago so later 1.0.x's may be fine too).


As far as the other stuff, I agree that due to the small audience, there's only so much they can do - but I think it's more than they're currently doing. I don't think it would be too much to ask to have someone at CSTV that's, say "the hockey guy". And his job is to help the streams get set up, occassionally monitor them, receive feedback, and just make sure that if there are problem, they get taken care of. Basketball & football could obviously require more than one person, maybe one for each region of the country.

Just someone who could receive feedback, *know what the heck is going on*, and make sure that issues are worked through. That way, once he hears there's a problem with the Cornell feed, he could call WHCU or a person in the box on their cell phone, and found out it's because someone pulled the plug on the network connection, and that to reset the whole thing should take, say, 10 minutes. Or they could call him.

He could post the information to the CSTV internal webpage: "Cornell hockey video feed down, lost internet, resetting up should allow video back in 15 minutes, maybe less" - and when we call, they could tell us. Rather than giving us bs answers.

Seriously, how hard would it be to air the pre-game show? But who do we ask about it, who is supposed to realize it's a demand and complaint? No one, cause CSTV doesn't care, Cornell athletics apparently doesn't care, and we don't have anyone else to contact.

Obviously they can't hire a full time staff to monitor every game/rink, but if they could just set up a few people to be the routes of communications, so we could know what's wrong, they could know what we want, and we could know that at least *someone* cares and is looking into it. Doing it right is more important than doing it as cheap as possible.

[Q]KeithK Wrote:

Why all the animus toward CSTV?[/Q]
Oh, come on Kyle. Bad service equals bad customer satisfaction equals complaining. Complaints, threats and actually cancelling service are the only kind of market feedback that might improve things.

I don't really care whether or not they have untrained students running the system. That's their problem. It's their responsibility to provide the service that they have promised. It would be very different if this was a free service provided by Cornell or a volunteers (and I think the reactions were different).
[/q]
I agree with this to some extent, Keith; in fact, I said something very similar in a thread for a game from a few weeks ago.

But when I'm not angry, I realize that there are practical considerations that make what they're trying to do very difficult to do at the price point they're charging. I guess my perspective is that I'm willing to cut them some slack given that they may not be able to provide better service for what we are collectively willing to pay, and something is better than nothing. Certainly I would be singing a different tune if they were completely incompetent, by which I mean every weekend a majority of us were unable to watch a large portion of either game; but that isn't the case.

I suspect they're trying, but are spread thin and have small margins on their overall business, with smaller schools perhaps even being loss-leaders. I don't know for that this is the case, but given my knowledge of this business, that's probably the case.

Cheers,
Kyle