Study Shows Disney, Netflix Continue To Dominate Traditional TV In Customer Satisfaction
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There's just something about terrible customer service, high prices, and sketchy product that consumers oddly don't like. American consumers' dislike of traditional cable TV providers was once again made clear this week in a new study by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which tracks US consumer approval of companies on a 100 point scale. As has long been the case, the full report shows most traditional cable TV, satellite, or IPTV providers languishing somewhere in the mid 60s -- scores that are bested by a long line of industries and government agencies (including the IRS).While the report shows that streaming did drop 2.6% to a score of 74 (thanks in part to COVID-era network strain and demand), that's still significantly better that most broadband and cable TV ratings, which remain mired in the 50s and 60s:Compare that to streaming, which provides consumers with cheaper service, greater flexibility, and better customer service:The cable industry was already struggling in early 2020, when a record number of cable customers "cut the cord" and flocked to over the air or streaming alternatives. That was before a pandemic came to town. But with live sports less consistent and folks desperate to cut costs as they struggled to pay rent, the trend simply exploded in the second half of last year. The number of folks still paying for traditional cable has now dropped more than 22.8% from pay TV's peak back in 2014. But by the end of 2024, analysts expect that fewer than half of US homes will subscribe to a traditional pay TV service.One survey predicts that 27 percent of US households are planning to cut cable TV from their budgets this year. That's quite an explosion for a trend that cable and broadcast executives have spent a decade pretending wasn't actually happening (it was), wasn't a big deal (it was), was only something poor losers do (studies repeatedly proved this claim false) or would rebound once Millennials began seriously procreating (that didn't happen).It's an ongoing lesson for the oodles of cable and broadcast executives who have been wrong about this phenomenon. For giant telecom incumbents their only saving grace is the fact that their monopolies over broadband access in many markets means the bloodshed isn't quite as bad as it otherwise would be, as they can simply extract their pound of flesh via price hikes on your broadband bill.
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posted at: 12:00am on 15-Jun-2021
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Geigner's Effect: CDPR Breach Worse Than Originally Reported, Because Of Course
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There has been a theorem proposed on these pages, originally by Mike himself, for a long time that goes something like this: when a data breach is first reported in the news, the severity of the breach is always, always, always underreported and there will eventually be an admission that the breach was much worse. Despite this not having been my original idea, I nonetheless slapped my name on it and called it The Geigner Effect. If that sort of name-slapping is good enough for former US Presidents, it's damned well good enough for me.Anyway, an example of this is Ninteno's 2020 breach, where user data for the Nintendo Network was stolen, with the number of reported accounts effected magically doubling from 140k to 300k after a few months. It's also happened with Equifax, TJX, and even our own federal government. Perhaps most infamously, it also occurred when Yahoo acknowledged there was an email breach of a few hundred thousand accounts in 2013 that grew and grew over subsequent reports until, eventually in 2017, Yahoo acknowledged that literally every account had been affected.In February, game studio CD Projekt Red acknowledged a breach of their corporate network. That breach was mostly for corporate assets, including source code for several games along with data from CDPR's "accounting, administration, legal, HR, investor relations, and more". Held for ransom, there was no mention in the ransom note one way or the other if user data was effected. CDPR for its part indicated it would not be giving into any monetary demands by the nefarious actors, but indicated it was working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the incident.“We will not give into the demands nor negotiate with the actor, being aware that this may eventually lead to the release of compromised data,” the company writes. CD Projekt Red writes that it does not believe the breach contains personal data from players.“We have already approached the relevant authorities, including law enforcement and the President of the Personal Data Protection Office, as well as IT forensic specialists, and we will closely cooperate with them in order to fully investigate the incident,” the company writes. And, well, that's been it since February. For the lay observer, this looked like CDPR's systems and data had been restored from backup and that whatever work the authorities had done must have had a good effect, as no more information was released. For all the world, it appeared as though there was no real fallout from any of this.Until this past Thursday, "coincidentally" the same day that E3 kicked off, when CDPR came out and admitted that the fallout from the breach both very much happened and is still going on.As the entire gaming world laser-focused on Geoff Keighley’s sartorially questionable sneakers during the Summer Game Fest Kickoff Live! event, Cyberpunk 2077 studio CD Projekt Red released a statement regarding a February cyberattack against the company. Turns out, that data breach could not be contained.“Today, we have learned new information regarding the breach, and now have reason to believe that internal data obtained during the attack is currently being circulated on the internet. [...] We are not able to confirm the exact contents of the data in question, though we believe it may include current/former employee and contractor details in addition to data related to our games,” CDPR wrote in a tweet published at 2:39 p.m. ET, smack in the middle of today’s hotly anticipated showcase of video gaming advertisements. This is the gaming industry equivalent of the old axiom: if you have to break news you really want to bury, break it at 5p on a Friday. In this case, CDPR was obviously attempting to limit the exposure of this news by announcing it just as the entire gaming world was focused on the start of E3. Why?Well, perhaps it has something to do with just how vague CDPR is still being about what it lost in this data breach.Today’s statement doesn’t say whether or not players of CDPR’s games were affected. Representatives for CDPR did not immediately respond to Kotaku’s request for comment. That silence is not a good sign. Either CDPR doesn't know if user data was included in the breach, or it does know and doesn't want to say. That would indicate that the answer to the question of whether CDPR's customers' data is out there in the wild is somewhere on a spectrum of "yes" and "maybe".And if the Geigner Effect holds true, one could expect a follow up post to this one on exactly that topic.
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posted at: 12:00am on 15-Jun-2021
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