It should be no secret that Comcast, as well as many other cable TV and internet providers, have a firm reputation for shoveling mountains of bullshit and calling it their base fees only to have a bunch of hidden or sneaky other fees attached to invoices that greatly inflate the price of services. These have taken the form of everything from so-called “Broadcast TV Fees“, really just the cost of programming as part of the television service, or “Internet Cost Recovery Fees” on the internet side, whatever the hell that means. The end result has been decades of pissed off customers who are only now beginning to have other viable options for content and internet services, with much of the frustration stemming from these inflated prices, sneaky fees, and a complete lack of transparency as to what any of this is for.
I’ve know this for years and years now. So, likely, have you, along with most of the rest of the public. Comcast’s President, Mike Cavanagh, acknowledged what we’ve all known, seemingly for the first time, on a recent Comcast earnings call.
“In this intensely competitive environment, we are not winning in the marketplace in a way that is commensurate with the strength of the network and connectivity products that I just described,” Cavanagh said. “[Cable division CEO] Dave [Watson] and his team have worked hard to understand the reasons for this disconnect and have identified two primary causes. One is price transparency and predictability and the other is the level of ease of doing business with us. The good news is that both are fixable and we are already underway with execution plans to address these challenges.”
The 183,000-subscriber loss lowered Comcast’s residential Internet subscribers to 29.19 million. Comcast also reported a first-quarter drop of 17,000 business broadband subscribers, lowering that category’s total to 2.45 million.
Nothing focuses the mind of a president of a major public company quite like a falling stock price, which is exactly what is happening to Comcast, with its stock dropping nearly 10% over the last five years. It’s a bit jarring to hear this said out loud by Cavanagh as though this is some kind of revelation, particularly given how often Comcast and other cable providers have appeared on lists of the companies that the public dislikes the most. Were they somehow not paying attention to those?
In any case, Cavanagh is saying all the right words about simplifying and locking in prices to avoid this frustration moving forward.
Cavanagh said that Comcast plans to make changes in marketing and operations “with the highest urgency.” This means that “we are simplifying our pricing construct to make our price-to-value proposition clearer to consumers across all broadband segments,” he said.
Comcast last week announced a five-year price guarantee for broadband customers who sign up for a new package. Comcast said customers will get a “simple monthly price starting as low as $55 per month,” without having to enter a contract, giving them “freedom and flexibility to cancel at any time without penalty.”
How well they pull this off is a matter of the specifics and the adherence to the promise. If Comcast finally fully goes all in on simplicity, knocks it off with the bullshit fees, and stops with the sneaky tactics to raise or otherwise hide prices, this will be received positively. Whether it’s enough to put the genie back in the bottle on public perception to turn around subscriber numbers is a different question, of course. I tend to think the train has already left the station on that one. Comcast apparently thinks that might be the case for a bit as well.
Comcast investors shouldn’t expect an immediate turnaround, though. “We anticipate that it will take several quarters for our new approach to gain traction and impact the business in a meaningful way,” Cavanagh said.
Look, Comcast has sucked on this stuff for many, many years. It’s going to take a bit of time and good behavior to gain the general public’s trust back, never mind someone like myself that cut the Comcast cord entirely years ago.
But if the company has finally found religion on its crappy behavior, that’s ultimately a good thing.