Bell Canada, After Nixxing Most Hardware DVR, Changes Cloud PVR Recording Retention
from the gotcha! dept
We’ve written about Bell Canada plenty over the years and not typically for good reasons. This is a company that wanted to ban VPNs to combat people getting around geo-blocked content, has a habit of acting petulant when it comes to regulators, and has engaged in other consumer-unfriendly practices. So, not the best reputation when it comes to treating its own customers, and the larger public, particularly well. You can think of them as something like a Canadian version of Comcast in the States.
As you might expect from a company that likes to wield a heavy hand, Bell Canada has been removing the ability for subscribers to use 3rd party DVRs in their homes, pushing people instead to use its cloud-based PVR platform to record content instead. Customers that signed up for that did so under an advertisement of a 1 year retention policy on recorded content.
Until today, that is, when Bell Canada announced and will begin enforcing a 60 day retention instead. Suprise!
On May 1, Fibe TV will automatically delete recordings stored on its Cloud PVR (personal video recorder) offering once the recordings hit 61 days of age, as confirmed by Canadian online newspaper Daily Hive. Currently, customers maintain access to recordings stored via Cloud PVR for 365 days.
Fibe TV apparently started alerting customers of the upcoming change this month.
A Bell Canada spokesperson, Jacqueline Michelis, minimized the idea of disruption to customers, telling Daily Hive: “The viewing of nearly all recordings takes place within 60 days, so there is minimal impact to customers.” Michelis didn’t provide more details on how Bell Canada arrived at this conclusion.
That last bit isn’t surprising considering just how many people are jumping into Bell support forums to express just how pissed off they are about this. And the flippant comments from the spokesperson don’t even bother to address the fact that Bell customers were told there would be one retention policy only to find out that it got 5/6th shorter now that they’ve signed up. There’s a term for that and it’s called a bait and switch.
And it doesn’t seem like Bell can even get implementing this right. While Bell has also made comments about this being a way to free up storage space, that certainly isn’t the case on the actual end user side.
Customers have turned to Bell Canada’s online support forum to share their discontent with the changes, with some saying that they don’t align with the services they expected to receive when signing up for Fibe TV. Thankfully, Bell Canada won’t be able to delete recordings stored on DVR hardware inside customers’ homes.
Other complaints are coming from users whose recordings are being deleted even when they haven’t come close to maxing out their cloud storage or if their recordings aren’t available on demand.
A user going by camisotro on Bell Canada’s online support forum called the announcement “absolutely ridiculous” and condemned what they perceived to be years of telecoms pushing back against users’ ability to record content.
To be clear, the cloud PVR costs money. $10/month, to be exact. And again, that subscription was sold with customers understanding that content would have a 1 year retention. How in the world this would not result in some kind of class action lawsuit on behalf of consumers is entirely beyond me.
Bell Canada competitors are already out with public comments committing to their own 1 year retention on cloud-based content recordings. I would imagine those competitors will have some new customers in very short order.
Filed Under: cloud pvr, cloud storage, dvr, fibe tv, pvr, retention
Companies: bell canada
Comments on “Bell Canada, After Nixxing Most Hardware DVR, Changes Cloud PVR Recording Retention”
Steal a million dollars from the richest person in the world. Worst crime imaginable.
Become the richest person by pushing people to their deaths, stealing from them, and committing fraud? Well that’s just good business and comes with a small fee to the government.
Why are they doing this?
It can’t be cost savings. Because Bell has extremely shitty engineers if this is actually a server cost issue. They should not be making a personal recording for every single individual customer. This should be one shared recording of that show – like YouTubeTV does. So server costs savings here should be minimal.
Re:
Right, and now they can delete that recording after 60 days—instead of keeping it for 365 days, because there’s inevitably gonna be one person in the country that refuses to delete stuff or doesn’t know how.
It’s unlikely they’ll ever reach the theoretical 5/6 reduction, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this cuts their storage needs in half.
Re: Enshittification. (hope I spelled that right)
Enshittification.
It happens to any business that reaches a certain, as yet undetermined level of capital holdings. The process itself has yet to be studied beyond news articles like this, where its really a best guess as to why they suddenly get stupid and attack their income source – customers.
Enshittification is a known corporate disease. Companies get rich by treating their customers good, and then, once they are rich, they start treating their customers like, well… shit.
Something to scrape off the sole of their shoe.
That is exactly what Bell is currently doing for a most perfect example of the disorder; they are shitting customers.
I keep seeing this board meeting where the head guy says something like.
We have to make much more money real fast no holds barred, now. And the second richest guy says, But we have tried everything.
And then the first guy gets a smug look on his face and says; Then lets do the opposite of what we have done to get here. Lets treat the customers like shit and see what happens.
Meeting adjourned.
I would suggest as treatment, a ceiling on personal and corporate wealth to prevent this sort of malady. One need only watch Elmo for a week to see how this disease can affect humans individually as well.
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Maybe to sell more on-demand services. Maybe an agreement with content owners fell through or content owners feel that this circumvents their ability to make even more money?
Can’t say I’m surprised. Bell has been on quite a roll of bad behaviour over the last several months alone. They managed to scam the federal government out of $40 million, then proceeded to hand that money directly to shareholders in the form of increased dividend. They told the government the money would be used to save journalism jobs only to fire 10% of its workforce. It was a move so dirty, even the government got pissed off at Bell. They hauled them into committee to explain themselves and Bell just sat there and gave non-stop non-answers and wasted every MPs time in an effort to play games.
Keep in mind that all that happened after they started begging the provinces for money and filed paperwork with the CRTC to get out of paying their fair share for the system.
It’s almost as if Bell is on a mission to piss off as many people as possible and counting up the angry messages they get afterwards and working on scoring a personal best for most hated telecom company in Canada. It really makes me wonder if they are run by people who are related to Comcast executives at this point.
It definitely could be. Bell Canada’s PVR has a few million subscribers at most, which would put their gross revenue in the low to mid 10s of millions.
They offer 500 channels, which works out to over 4 million hours of HD TV per year. Probably somewhere in the range of $0.5 to $1.5 million/month in storage costs. Cutting that by 5/6th would have a noticeable effect on revenue and profits for a small company like that.
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Bell Canada employs almost 50k people and had an annual net income of $1.5b in 2023. It’s hard to imagine they would piss off customers by reneging on earlier promises to save, what, $15m a year at best?
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I take it you’ve never dealt with them.
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You’re looking at the wrong numbers, Strawb. The revenue and employees of Bell Canada aren’t what matters. The revenue of the PVR program is what matters. It needs to turn a profit itself — it isn’t a loss leader for the rest of Bell Canada.
Ten bucks a month times a few million subscribers is not $1.5b. It is a few tens of millions of dollars.
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I’m assuming you and Strawb took things too literally, and Dan meant “small company” sarcastically.
Bell Canada could easily afford to maintain the 365-day storage till each term-contract runs out, and for all existing recordings. And then it’d transition to 60 days on renewal, which I’m sure people would be upset about but wouldn’t be a bait-and-switch.
Re: Re:
Angering customers doesn’t matter. Time and time again customers get angry when they receive news like this. The change happens, they get really mad for a minute. Then they just deal with it™ because there isn’t much alternative choice anyway. Eventually shittier service becomes to new status quo.
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or terminate the service, it sucks anyway.
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Except the high seas, as the saying goes. VPNs are not just for computer nerds anymore. Some years ago, a relative got an “Android box” from “some guy” to watch sporting events, and when that stopped working they somehow managed to set up a VPN. If not for corporate greed, I doubt this person would have bothered with any of it; but I guess they stuff they watch doesn’t just show up on Netflix.
Re: But...
Presumably almost every customer subscribes – after all, (a) Bell would want everyone to pay $10 more and (b) pretty much everyone time-shifts their viewing.
Other than news and sports, nothing I watch is live; how else do I skip commercials? Plus, the wife’s soaps are on during the daytime when we’re not watching. Even if the TV is on as background noise – CNN, MSNBC, or Al Jazeera – some shows like Maddow and Zakaria are recorded.
I switched to Shaw several years ago – went from Bell’s $300/mo for TV,phone and internet to $150/mo with Shaw. Bell has been trying to sell me fibre (they were digging up the neighbourhood last year. When they said they could undercut Shaw, my reaction is “why didn’t you do that starting 10 years ago?” I’d used their satellite service before that and generally found their customer service to be dismal. (Sent back a failed satellite receiver and they tried to charge me $600 claimed they never received it, until I produced the waybill number)
Generally with recordings, there are some we watch within a week and some we keep a long time to re-watch. I agree, the problem will be the people who don’t know how to delete recordings they’ve already watched (or never got around to it) but those people will have their quota full all the time, which would imply the oldest recordings could bump off the end as new ones came along – a kinder strategy than nuking anything 60 days old. (Presumably newer recordings are the ones that are kept for a lot more subscribers)
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Because they like money; simple as that. You stuck with them for 10 years at those inflated rates.
Among those with more time than money, it’s common to call up service providers annually and threaten to cancel unless they give a better price. They’ll almost always give huge discounts. But my grandmother just went through this with Bell, and they called her bluff somewhat; the really good offers didn’t come till after she’d switched to a competitor (two, actually: switching from a landline to a home VOIP connection, plus a cellphone to use during power outages, was still much cheaper than the Bell line).
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Well, maybe you don’t want to hear this answer, but there are… other… suppliers of TV shows and movies. Ones that charge nothing, remove the commercials for you, and are well-respected by almost everyone using them.
They're Telecoms, after all
For now…
Looks like the content ‘owners’ have over valued their product.
I’ll be damned!
Enshittification isn’t an American Disease!!!
It’s a human disease!
Even Canadian humans!
Must be something that we globally share in that’s the cause then huh?
Wonder what that might be…
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American companies wish they could get away with what the Canadian companies do. Canadian cellphone plans regularly earn the title of worst value in the world; they’re kind of like what Americans had 10 to 20 years ago.
Back in the DSL days, Canadian regulation was somewhat effective. But Bell basically got away with throttling third-party wholesale customers, and the regulators have been letting the wholesale market die. Nearly everything’s been bought by competitors, because wholesalers can’t realistically offer fibre service (they’d have to pay Bell like $110/month, when Bell offer retail service for less).
The regulators let themselves get distracted with regulating TV, which has been an enshittfying market forever and a dying one for like 20 years. Honestly, this story hardly seems worth Timothy’s attention.
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Human nature.
We just need to make bate and switch tactics completely unlawful, in any industry or sector, with extremely heavy fines if you do so. If you promise something to your customers, you must deliver on it, regardless of what you want, IMO. Unless, of course, you can definitively prove that delivering on it would be impossible. I’m guessing this too much to ask for though.
Cloud DVR Limited
Instead of restricting dither giving consumers the ability to downloading recordings beyond the year, 60 days, 30 days. This would ease consumer’s feelings of consciously RAPE by providers.