Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Rogers Digital Cable Offer

You know those deals that sound too good to be true? I hate those.

I went through an insane sales pitch experience recently with a travel company (The Travel Store) - more on that at another time (I'm still waiting to see how ridiculous it gets).

Yesterday, however, I got a call from Rogers that had me scratching my head. They were offering me a digital box at no charge for one year (anyone else get this call?). My bill wouldn't change, and if I chose to keep the box after the one year, I would simply pay the regular $6.96/month price.

Hmmm...what's the catch? None, according to them.

So I went by the local Rogers store, picked up my box and set it up upon returning home.

Voila: digital cable.

The immediate benefit is that I can now receive a couple of channels that came in fuzzy before (NBC and CKVR, for some reason) and the handy-dandy remote allows me to control my tv, vcr, dvd player AND stereo (I need to run the tv sound through it - long story). The universal remote I was using before didn't quite cover all of these bases adeqately.

On top of the million channels I now get (and will never use) I can also access Rogers on Demand and pay-per-view options (though, for $40 versus $10, I think I'd rather see UFC ppvs in a pub)

The bitch is that there's a lag between channels when flipping. And anyone who knows me knows I'm an unrepentant channel flipper. This will take some getting used to.

So I guess Rogers is hoping I'll get hooked on the "superior picture quality" or maybe order tons and tons of movies. Otherwise, this seems like an expensive promotion for them.

But in case they think I'll simply forget to cancel at the end of the year term and shell out for the extra $6.95 per month: I canceled my additional Bell features this morning.

An elephant and a thrifty bastard never forget.

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