Thread regarding DIRECTV layoffs

I work on Stream, but also work on a lot of the legacy satellite code. I feel like the product is solid, but the marketing and tech support is horrible. DTV Stream has come a long way since the sh---y AT&T days.

Stream is the push and the hope for survival as it has become increasingly obvious that the legacy sat side is destined for the dustbin. Even the IHX phone pi-ps try to talk the customer into going with Stream while we are there hanging the dish for crying out loud. Talk about battling with your own company!

We in the Legacy Sat Field have reached out numerous times over this past year asking for support and guidance, only to be blown off with " we have no budget, we have no personnel, we have no resources" to devote to this side of the house.

Daily, I am asked by customers if they can upgrade to newer technology. I have to explain to them that the 7,8,9 year old Genie they have is the same thing I would install today if they were a new customer. The most recent box, the POS Genie 2, came out in 2016/2017 and I wouldn't install that piece of junk for my dog. We once lead the industry with new tech every two years. Now, we lag the industry by almost a decade. Pathetic.

The legacy side of this house is being just as ignored by the current Management as it was under AT&T. We are one full year into this "rebirth" and we still wear 4 year old raggedy, torn and faded AT&T shirts to greet our customers at their door while at the same time, see all these millennial office wonks sporting shiny new DTV shirts on their stupid Workplace posts. Mind tossing some of those shirts our way since we are the people who actually stand in the doorway of the customers who pay your Workplace bill?

All of my young guys have bailed for other careers as they should. Us old-timers are hanging for the buyout and retirement in the next year or so. I'm gone in five months and it can't come soon enough. Good riddance.

Well.. even though I like the sound of it, the fact is satellite is the one paying us biweekly. Streaming generates nothing. We are fed because of the mercy of satellite and uverse. So…

Stream strikes me as a last ditch effort to salvage a product line that fewer and fewer consumers want to be saddled with.

The whole point behind "Cord Cutting" was to break away from a bloated and banal programming package stuffed with hundreds of mediocre channels that few people actually watch.

Ten years ago, DTV, Dish and the CATVs were locked in a war of escalation over who had the most channels, later to become, who had the most in HD. Every week it was we have 500 channels, we have 1000 channels, we have a bazillion channels. Yet, throughout this battle Nielsen Ratings held true with the fact that the average viewer watched 4-5 channels on a regular basis, so why have thousands if most only watched a handful.

Had any company had the sense or the contracts to go A-La-Carte, they could have locked up the audience in a heartbeat. But no, to get the one Discovery Network channel you wanted you had to buy all 20 or 30 of their turkeys. This is where streaming held an advantage - sign up to watch the one series you were interested in, then cancel with a click of an online button until the next cool show caught your interest.

Which leads me to D Stream - the same bloated banal channel lineup the Sat side carries with no differentiation other than a talking remote and a whizz-bang Osprey box. We are in essence telling our customers - you can pay the highest price for TV delivered over an ugly grey vulture of a dish on your roof - OR - for a similar bloated price, you can get the same garbage shoveled into your home over the Internet!

Aren't we so cool?

P.T. Barnum said a su---r is born every minute, so there is hope for us. But come next year when Sunday Ticket goes bye-bye and we lose the 10-12% of customers who actually pay for that followed by the Fed Reserve's predicted recession in early 2023 and I can only believe that our current quarterly loss rate of 424 to 462 thousand customers will dramatically increase.

As testimony to the awareness of this probability, in the last three years the yard I oversee has gone from 4 supervisors, 51 Techs, 3 warehouse personnel, one on-site trainer and 2 admin clerks to now, we have one supe, one temp agency warehouse attendant and 11 Techs - and two of them are slated to quit this month. Everyone else has seen the writing on the wall and left for companies offering more of a long-term career path. I'm old enough and close enough to retire to afford to stick around for the closing act in another 13 months.

Compare us to the traditional POTS Telco industry - we are the landline company in the age of cell phones.