Shaw Cablevision and the Stupidity of Bundling

June 14, 2010

Related: Digital Living, Fun and Fail, The Media

It seems that every time I contact Shaw Cablevision, I come away somewhere between disappointed and furious. After several months without cablevision, I decided to re-connect to watch my summer reality show guilty pleasures.

Shaw — like many cable providers, to be fair — bundle their most popular channels, forcing you to pay arbitrarily high prices for the single channel you want.

• If you want HBO — just HBO — you’ll have to pay for four movie channels.¹
• If you want just TSN2, you’ll be forced to pay for channels 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, and 87² even if you never plan to watch them.

This bundling is pitched to consumers as offering “better value.” In reality, it’s a way of obfuscating the price.

My Dream Ad Campaign

Just once, I’d love to see an ad from a cable provider in which the CEO, straight to camera, says

“We know our bundling makes ordering services from us confusing. That’s why from now on, each individual channel costs $3. Order as many or as few as you want. And take only the channels you want.”

The Sound of Shaw’s Silence

But we won’t hear this from Shaw. Actually, we never hear much of anything from the company. Shaw is a notoriously tight-lipped, family organization. It’s privately held and only the CEO-Owner, Jim Shaw, speaks on behalf of the company. Or, I should say, doesn’t speak. When covering technology for the CBC, I occasionally had to call Shaw for comment on related stories — not a single call for comment was returned.

Photo J McIntosh/CP

And good luck finding any social media channels — I couldn’t find a single Facebook page or group for the company, and the variants of Shaw’s name I guessed on Twitter clearly aren’t owned by the company.

Ordering Is Broken

Let’s say you opt to take your chances with the bundling game and add channels anyway — you’ll be doing it by phone since there’s no way to activate channels online. Shaw’s online customer care centre, at the time of this writing, actually returns a web server error. Classic.

Shaw would do well to get some basics underway — a monitored Twitter account and a Facebook page at the very least — and start listening to customers. It wouldn’t take much. For the time being, I’m holding http://twitter.com/shawcablevision. Jim, when you’re ready…

UPDATE: Apparently, Shaw has just hired someone to handle social media stuff. (Hat tip to Colleen.)

1. Three separate Movie Channel channels, plus a high-def version of one of the channels. [↩]
2. Canadian time-shifted channels [↩]