Dear Bell: Thanks For Everything. Sincerely, The Underground Economy

Last Updated on: 22nd October 2013, 10:28 am

Newsflash for those who may not know it yet. Bell Canada is a horrible company that doesn’t care about its customers and has no idea how the world works in 2011.

exclusive deals to broadcast TV content on mobile devices encourage innovation and shouldn’t be banned? Have you paid no attention to the internet? The best things about it were created by people independent of each other all coming together to build something, or by companies with resources building something and then opening it up to the wider community and letting them improve on it. There’s a reason why traditional distribution methods like magazines, newspapers, physical music delivery and yes, even television are struggling while the internet continues to grow. That reason is openness and people’s willingness to pitch in to help better a project, sometimes for little or no compensation. If you create something that people want, the money will come…eventually.

But Bell would rather drag the corpse of the old days Weekend At Bernie’s style into the new age, because they don’t care about what people want. Really, they don’t. Mirko Bibic pretty much said so.

If companies are allowed to sign exclusive deals for content on smartphones and other devices, it could mean customers would need multiple subscriptions and multiple gadgets to see all the shows they want.

However Bibic said it is “preposterous” to think Canadians should be able to access whatever content they wanted on whatever device and whatever carrier they were using.

If Mirko Bibic worked for me, that idiocy just got him fired…twice.

Again, look at the internet. What have exclusive deals and limited access done? The answer is a whole hell of a lot…for the smart people who run pirate sites. The pirates know what they’re doing. Here’s an unrestricted decent looking and sounding version of whatever it was you wanted to see. Yes, all of it. Not just what this or that network thinks you should see because of where you live or who your provider is. Run it however you’d like, wherever you’d like, whenever you want. All we ask for is a donation, and you don’t even have to give us that if it’s not your thing.

There are a lot of people (myself included) who would be more than willing to access programming from the source for free or for a fee if it was as convenient and as free of digital locks and equipment requirements as what the good pirates are offering. Same goes for music. It’s time to forget about who has rights to what in this or that country. this is the internet, and none of that matters anymore. You geoblock something, we’re getting around it and watching it anyway. You won’t let us buy something from the place we want to buy it from, ok, we’ll grab that for free. Content creation and delivery isn’t what it used to be. Rather than buying up rights and seeing who has the most bills when its all over, companies need to realize that making less money is better than making no money at all. The customer has a lot more power now than he used to. I know that doesn’t matter to Bell, but it should. Without customers, there’s no money at all.

By the way, if you haven’t read the article I linked at the beginning, can you guess who made the quite reasonable statement about people having to buy multiple devices to access everything? In a million years I wouldn’t have. It was Rogers. Yes, the company that spends most of its time racing Bell to the bottom actually made a valid point and stuck up for the ones who pay the bills. I’m almost positive they have a self-serving reason for doing so given their history, but until I find it, thank you, rogers.

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