Verizon Wireless, Can you hear me now? Oink, Oink, Oink, Can you hear me now, Oink, Oink, Oink, Squeel, Oink, Oink, Oink, Oink Hosted on ZooomrRob Pegoraro – Missing the Big Picture – washingtonpost.com Rob Pegoraro over at the Washington Post is out with an article entitled “Missing the Big Picture,” about today’s announced Verizon/YouTube deal where Verizon is going to try to charge you $15 a month for their V Cast service to include a limited selection of YouTube videos for you to watch on your cell phone. No you won’t be getting any of the good crap from YouTube, you’ll get videos that have been pre-screened and sanitized by both comapnies.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! That’s a good one! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Hillarious!
Do they really think people will pay them $15 a month? Verizon, the same pig that tried to charge you $1.99 for song downloads on your cell phone *plus* a $15 a month subscription fee before they killed the $15 a month fee back in August earlier this year?
People hate their cell phone providers. I hate Cingular. They can’t be trusted. They’ve screwed me out of money in the past. They’ve lied to me. They’ve used misinformation. But the other cell phone providers are just as bad. They lock people into long contracts, nickle and dime you to death, give horrible customer service, gouge you.
You see the thing is, even if I was willing to pay $15 for YouTube (something that I get for free), I still wouldn’t do it because somehow I’m sure the cell phone company would figure out some way to really charge me $29.99 a month and another $180 when I cancel the service 27 months into my contract. There would be hidden taxes, data minute overages, etc. etc.
Forget about who wants to watch TV on a 2 inch screen in the first place. And then you have the drop outs in the middle of your video watching and the poor transfer rates and all the places that you can’t even get cell phone reception.
I’d much rather download video content to my laptop and watch it there on the big (well, by comparison) screen — get this, FOR FREE!
Remember that other crazy thing Verizon was going to do? Remember they were going to charge you $5 per month to be able to schedule (yes schedule, not watch) shows on your TiVo via your Verizon phone? Something that you can do with your TiVo or with Yahoo or TiVo online for free. Remember that? Whatever happened to that brilliant idea? Probably the same idiot product manager who came up with that one came up with this new YouTube scheme.
So lets see, now I can listen to music on my Verizon phone, surf the web on my Verizon phone, schedule my TiVo on my Verizon phone all for the low monthly price of… $986 per month! Brillant! We’ll squeeze those suckers for every last penny. We’ll be the tollkeepers of the Internet! We’ll rule the world! Wah ha ha!
Verizon are a bunch of greedy pigs and just like their excessively priced song downloads this one will flop as well. I’m disappointed that YouTube is involved in this fiasco. Hopefully they got a big chunk of money up front for their service rather than a revenue share which will be peanuts if anything at all.
Let’s see what some of the other pundits are saying:
Matthew Ingram: “I know that Forrest Gump said “Stupid is as stupid does,” but there’s really no other word for what Verizon is doing…”
Fred Wilson: “This just is sooo lame.”
Om Malik: “Despite Verizon network’s superior quality, I refuse to subscribe to them, because their (deck) interface, regardless of the phone, is the mobile equivalent of Chinese water torture.”
Jeremy Toeman: “YouTube is viral, not programmed. And that’s the key flaw in the Verizon/YouTube relationship.”