Lateral-g Forums - Don't forget... set your DVR's for this Friday at 8 pm!!

As always, we appreciate everyone's feedback and understand your frustration if your provider doesn't offer MAVTV. I go to my dad's house to watch the episodes on DirecTV, because I have Uverse at home. If I didn't have so many issues with Time Warner Cable previously, I'd have simply switched back to them by now.

There is a link on the MAVTV site, where you can demand MAVTV from your current provider and each provider generally has a feedback section as well.

I think those have limited impact, because your request turns into a number. Fortunately, Al Gore's Internet offers us other avenues to pursue, which I have done to probably an unhealthy level. From first-hand experience, I know corporations probably put too much weight at times into what is being said in social media about their brand/product, etc...

The louder the voice, the more it resonates. For whatever reason, more than 3,000 people have decided to follow me on Twitter, which isn't exactly Ashton Kutcher-like in size, but definitely far larger than the typical user. I have voiced my concerns there several times and Uverse does respond with their generic fill out a survey response, to which I angrily reply. Dish also trolls Twitter for angry customers of competitors, with the ladies there offering me sweetheart deals to switch.

All of these companies also seem almost too forthcoming with sharing information about who their executives are and what they do. J Christopher Lauricella is the decision-maker at Uverse, Jennifer Gaiski is the point person at Comcast (MAVTV is offered in some of their markets) and the list goes on and on, with most of the folks who have "Content Acquisition" or something like that in their titles, being key decision-makers on which networks providers carry. Even if their e-mails aren't visible, probably too many of them can be found in a wide variety of social media channels, especially LinkedIn, where I have also reached out to them with my request for more MAVTV.

Just the fact that I've posted all of those company names on this forum has probably resulted in this thread showing up in multiple monitoring reports for those providers and they are all monitoring conversations, even if they don't actively participate. MAVTV knows who all the key decision-makers are with every provider, but their hands are somewhat tied, because they don't want to upset the wrong people with an onslaught of angry requests that don't come through the "proper channels" by sharing those names with people who want to see their programming changed.

The bottom line is that it all costs a lot of money. It costs a lot to produce the shows, to sponsor the shows, to air the shows, etc... Network carrier agreements prohibit the shows from simply being posted online somewhere for people to watch at their leisure (and FF through commercials) at least anytime soon, but we are working on that.

I remember reading a post on FB earlier this year from Mike Musto about how Big Muscle had to go pay-per-view, just to cover expenses & it looks like NBC Sports picked up /Drive so most of that content will now be shown exclusively to broadcast audiences and not be posted online anymore. The stuff all costs money and I understand the desire to just have it conveniently available to watch online, but unless advertisers and businesses can make a good business case for such a model, they won't do it and people will have to watch it through traditional channels.

If we were able to get the episodes online, how much would you be willing to pay to watch each episode or a season-long subscription?

Jim McIlvaine
eCare Manager, OPTIMA Batteries
www.pinterest.com/optimabatteries