Rachel Lynn Brody's Blog, page 12

The Bright Side of Life

Because one is always grateful for chocolate.

Things have been a little challenging this week. On top of the “usual” back stuff, I had an apartment maintenance issue that reared its head. I decided, rather than feel sorry for myself, to make a list of ten things that are worth being thankful for.

1. While the bathroom ceiling may have caved in, my apartment is still standing. Given the tornadoes ripping through the Midwest right now, that makes me lucky.

2. I have health insurance and good doctors who are helping me get slowly better.

3. My new roommate seems pretty cool, and so far she’s been a nice person to have around.

4. I am going to publish a collection of short stories in the next couple of months. Hopefully before the end of May. But no pressure.

5. I have lost about 15% of my total weight since January. I have a ways to go but I am determined to get there, and that will have a positive overall effect on my health.

6. I am planning some fun trips for when I get better. There will be Geek Girl Con in Seattle, and I may even head overseas this fall. Plus, since I’ve been injured, I’ve seen a bit more of my family than usual.

7. I AM FINALLY GOING TO SEE TWENTY ONE PILOTS. In September, with the friend who tried to win us tickets in January. And hopefully, by September, my back will be in good shape. (KNOCK ON WOOD.)

8. The weather in NYC is that perfect point between freezing and too hot to bear, and should stay that way for a few more weeks.

9. Since I live in NYC, I can get almost anything delivered to my house, which has been a total lifesaver throughout this whole back thing.

10. Bit by bit, I’m clearing my life of things I don’t need, which gives me more room to be the person I want to be, living a life that makes me glad.

BONUS 11. The blog my friend and I started in January has gone from being a fun joke between friends to a community of nearly 4000 people, and they are so sweet and lovely. Every day, they trust us with the sad and stressful things going on in their lives, and we do what very little we can to make them feel better. Which, in turn, makes me feel better.

It might seem silly but writing that stuff down made me feel a bit better about some of the less-awesome things going on right now. If you’re feeling down, give it a shot and see how you feel afterwards. There’s always something around that can drive a person nuts – so, what makes you happy, instead?

Your Mind Is Beautiful, Your Notes Need Not Be

One of my favorite things about writing is how entire worlds, full of connections and characters and meaning, can simmer in your head right up to the moment when they burst out onto the page (or screen, as the case may be). Even so, thinking about stories, and eventually writing then down – especially once your life has reached a point where you’re snatching minutes from other obligations – can make keeping a train of thought difficult.

While I’ve never been one for formal outlines, over the years I’ve come to realize that making some kind of lose structural notes can help me both keep a story on track and make sure it’s tightened up before I have to restart it too many times.

My toolbox has a few basic methods in it, and today I’m going to share it with you.

1. Whiteboard/Visual Outlining

This is one of my favorite ways to outline a writing project. Whether you’re working in prose, film or theater format, I find that visual representations of ideas can be a great way to get ideas out of your head and down on paper.

Pros: fast, informal, fun, free-form. You can follow your gut and explore new pathways easily, with fewer lasting repercussions. Want to change a theme or an action, or foreshadow something happening later in your story? Just go back and add in another layer of your thought-web.

Cons: can be tricky to transcribe easily, leaves you looking like you went all BEAUTIFUL MIND if you happen to use a whiteboard wall. VERY unstructured, usually requires another round or two of thinking through what you want to say before you have something you can really work from. Hard to share with others.

2. The Save the Cat Beat Sheet

Last year, a friend introduced me to this tool during a too-infrequent visit. Based on Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat model, which is geared towards screenwriting, the adaptation I’ve been using is from a site called Liz Writes Books, and lets you plug the length of your project in, then adjusts for length. This is the method I’ve been using on the project Sareliz and I are working on together, and it’s been nothing short of brilliant. Using this excel sheet, we can easily communicate ideas and plot lines, and once I finished the sheet for the first novella in our series, the first draft was finished inside of a week.

Pros: Organized, helps make sure you’re hitting every note on your way through the novel.

Cons: The last time I tried to share the link with someone, the Excel sheet had been taken down. It looks like it’s back up, but who knows for how long, so I’d advise you to save a copy to your hard drive. The names of the steps can be a little misleading, but there’s plenty of additional information on Snyder’s theory out there to read up on.

3. Step-by-step Guide

Most of my notes for stories wind up being in this format. The other day, for example, I went all Beautiful Mind on my whiteboard; in transcribing the ideas over and making them into something I could coherently share, the ideas fell most easily into this form. An example would be, “Jane talks about her feelings. John doesn’t want to hear it, he leaves, she follows him, they argue. Everything blows up in her face.” Nice and succinct, gives you a general throughline on the story.

Pros: Easy to write organically, easy to keep up with your thoughts.

Cons: Hard to share in raw form, since specifics are rarely spelled out. Requires you to keep the specifics in mind as you work – what are Jane’s feelings? Why doesn’t John want to hear about them? 

4. Formal Outline

I hate formal outlines. I probably only use them when writing feature scripts and TV scripts, since those are two of the most structured forms of writing I know. If I’m writing a play, I rarely use an outline at all until I’m at least halfway through and have learned a bit about the characters. Anyway, a formal outline goes scene by scene and details what’s going to happen in each. Usually, they require several drafts themselves. What I find is that where feature films and TV scripts are concerned, they’re absolutely necessary, because you need to be able to adjust the story in major ways before you commit to writing a 50- or 120-page script. With short films and shorter episodic stories, however, I find they’re kind of a waste of time. In the time I can write a formal outline, I can work through two or three drafts of a short film script.

Pros: You pretty much must write one for a longer filmed project, and it’s good to at least know your way around putting one together. If you can keep focused, they make the actual writing of a script go much more quickly than it might otherwise go.

Cons: They’re bloody boring to write and then iron out, and in some cases you run the risk of getting tired of the project before you’re even at a first draft stage.

So, there are four methods for gathering your ideas and turning them into a coherent piece of creative writing. There are plenty more options – index cards, for example, though I’ve never been able to get the hang of using those – and these are just my preferences.

What method do you use in working on your creative writing pieces? Have you heard about other ways of working that I haven’t listed here? I’d love to hear about them if you have, so feel free to leave a comment!

Pay-To-Play, Theater Edition: Companies Who Make Playwrights Pay

Imagine you’re a doctor. You’ve put time, money and effort into your training, and have come to be regarded as a professional in your field. Now, there’s a job for a local hospital where you’d like to work. The job carries a $50 “application fee,” and once the hospital in question has decided they want you practicing under their auspices, you’re going to have to pay $5000 in order to see or treat any patients. You can expect about $100 per patient seen as a “kickback” for the chance to treat them, as a way of “honoring” your “investment” with the hospital.

Are you going to take the job? Are you even going to apply?

More importantly, as a patient, are you going to believe that the hospital involved is really interested in providing you with the best medical care available?

Now imagine the hospital is a theater company, and you’re a playwright.

The number of theater companies who think it’s okay to charge both reading and acceptance fees to playwrights seems to be on the rise. And that’s not okay. Playwrights aren’t going to cut into your body (not physically, at least) and they’re not going to save you from an acute life-or-death situation (though they might write something that sticks with you for years to come), but they’re still artists(often trained and practiced) who have put time, effort and ability into their work. And they have no business subsidizing theater companies.

The other day on Facebook, a friend pointed out an “opportunity” for writers who wanted to work with one of NYC’s downtown theater company. After paying a $15 application/reading fee, anyone who was accepted could also look forward to being charged a $175 “acceptance fee” to see their work performed.

Excuse me?

Dear budding playwrights and other writers: the name for a company that poduces or publishes you in exchange for money is “vanity publisher.”

I realize that reading plays takes time, and producing them takes money, but as a company, if you’re not making enough off your ticket sales and from producer investments to profit from a play without charging the people who wrote them (who are notorious, industry-wide, for NOT GETTING PAID FOR THEIR WORK) to put them on – and you’re not okay with that – then do you really have any business running a theater festival?

Open a theater school. Run a summer camp. Set yourself up as a dramaturg-for-hire. Open your company to development-for-hire.

Just don’t pretend you’re interested in producing theater that opens opportunities or artistic space for those who can’t afford to subsidize you.

When I co-produced ANY OBJECTIONS? for Glasgay 2012, my fellow producer and I put out a global call for short plays dealing with marriage equality. We were particularly interested in getting plays from Asia, Africa and other regions that were under-represented in the world of Western theater, because those were the perspectives we felt it might be most important to show our primarily English-speaking audience. Our only barrier to entry? The plays had to be in English – we simply didn’t have the time or money required to make a translator available.

Did we charge a reading fee? No. Did we charge an “acceptance fee”? No. Did we make any money off anybody but the patrons who came to the performance? No, we did not. And did everybody involved get some kind of paid?

You bet your underwear they did.

The actors got paid, the director got paid, and every single participating writer (with the exception of one who chose to remain anonymous and who, I believe, we were unable to contact with follow-up information, despite our best efforts) got a check as payment for their participation in the event.

Paying For The Right To Work

While the language of the Playbill notice differs slightly from the language used on the company’s website, let’s note that this is posted in a major theatrical publication under the title of “Editorial/Job Opportunity,” and the last time I saw a job you had to pay to take it was because they were selling you a kit of “E-Z ASSEMBLE-AT-HOME JEWELRY, MAKE $5000/MONTH” or a list of real estate leads. Let’s also note that this is a production festival for female playwrights, a group that’s historically under-represented in theater productions worldwide – which, to my mind, makes it even more unethical to charge them for the privilege of having their work produced.

The company who placed the ad cited above offers a $1-per-ticket return (they call it a “kickback) after a $175 “acceptance fee” – which comes after a $15 “reading fee,” mind – so that the playwright can hope to recoup some of her investment. That means a playwright has to see three sold out shows and one half-full house before she’s broken even. Does the company give any information on their average audience size for the festival, past production attendance or marketing reach? No? What? You mean the festival’s only in it’s first year, so there’s no data on how much reach it has or what ticket prices should be? (Note: While I’ve emailed the company regarding questions about past audience size, marketing reach and more, they requested more information Tuesday and have not responded to subsequent emails.)

If we playwrights are investing, shouldn’t we be doing so in an informed manner? And shouldn’t the company we’re investing in encourage that?

With this kind of barrier to entry, the company is already excluding any playwright who doesn’t have nearly $200 in her budget from even competing. Is this approach really going to net them the most talented, most engaging entrants? Is it going to open up the possibility of performance in a meaningful way? As an audience member, do you think that this company is more interested in producing an evening of theater that excites and challenges you, or in finding a way to wring as much money as possible from an evening of performances?

I get it, making theater takes money. I also understand that not everyone has a deep-pocketed producer on board to help offset their costs. I’ve produced theater under those circumstances, too. You know what we did? Anybody who put money in got their money back first, and any profits were split evenly between all members of the company.

Know what else? Every single one of those productions was profitable.

Artists Get Taken Advantage Of All The Time – Don’t Be One Of Them

Many years ago, a co-worker told me about a friend who had started a photography festival and was now living off the entry fees. Each photographer who sent an entry was charged $150 for the privilege, and in addition to making enough to pay for a considerable cash prize, the person who had started the contest was now making a full-time living off the fees.

So excuse me if I’m a little skeptical of companies that set up on this kind of model. As a producer, either you believe in the work you’re putting on stage or you don’t. If you do, then you assume the financial risk, pay your artists (or take them on in an equal, transparent profit-share), and hope for the best.

If you don’t believe in the work, and you don’t think you’re going to make a profit, and you have a problem with that, then don’t produce the play in the first place.

That said, the only way this practice is going to stop is if writers stop responding to these calls for work. So writers, if you value your work and your time, don’t buy into the hype. Submit to the hundreds of opportunities that don’t ask for your financial investment. You’ve already put your time, training and effort into your art. Don’t feel like you have to pay someone else to make it for you.

Charging artists to produce their work in order to make yourself a buck isn’t about making quality theater. It’s about running the production equivalent of a vanity press.

Presenting that as a great opportunity for new playwrights is not okay.

 

*To note: this is not the only company charging for acceptance (although Manhattan Rep frames their Spring One Act as a production fee, not one aimed at playwrights, and doesn’t charge for entry) nor are they charging the most.

Permission to Take it Easy

Why is it that the moment we give ourselves permission to take it easy, projects and possibilities seem to become easier themselves?

Yesterday, I posted about a new short fiction anthology, partly because I wanted you to know about it but also partly because I was starting to feel like I was overwhelmed and floundering. Three of the pieces I wanted to include seemed like they were going to take a lot more work than I’d initially thought, and I was letting that start to sidetrack the entire project.

Just before I wrote yesterday’s post, I had decided it wasn’t worth the stress to try and corral those three stories into the current collection. I’d edited one, but gotten bogged down in some of the bigger changes that were necessary, and to be honest it was starting to feel like the thread of the story was getting away from me. Within five minutes of writing yesterday’s blog, though, I suddenly felt like I had not only the energy I’d need to do those stories justice, but the knowledge of how to go about making them publication-ready.

Sometimes we put too much pressure on ourselves. I remember when I was working on my short story for HOT MESS, I wrote a throw-away short story before I got around to the two pieces that ended up in the anthology. Just writing something - anything – took the pressure to be perfect off me, and swept my mental desk clean enough to get some quality work done. Apparently, deciding that I didn’t need to include the three short stories I discounted yesterday morning was enough to give my brain the space it needed to start solving problems.

So who knows – SHORT FRICTIONS may include a few more pieces, after all. You’ll just have to wait till it’s published to find out.

In the meantime, check out your own to-do list. What on it can wait? What have you pressured yourself to take care of, when maybe you didn’t need to? Try crossing something off the list, and see how you feel. You might find that it energizes you enough to carry you through the rest of your tasks – and who knows, that x’d-off item might even find its way back onto the roster.

 

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SHORT FRICTIONS: Collecting a Collection of Short Stories

I first started talking about publishing a collection of short stories shortly after HOT MESS went live. Initially, I had a set of about eight short stories on themes around artificial intelligence and robots – some written, some ideas – and the group of them should have been out for your reading pleasure about a year and a a half ago.

Obviously, that hasn’t happened.That isn’t to say I haven’t been writing. I have. A lot. And two weeks ago, I realized that what I thought were a couple of reader-ready stories were actually several more than that. Also that I have a tendency to forget when I’ve finished something if I don’t make a big deal of it right away.

Therefore, this post is an announcement of an upcoming publication from yours truly.

Some of the stories I wanted to write wound up not being the ideas I thought they were, others were far longer than I’d meant them to be, and in at least one case, a criticism from a friend crawled into my brain and died there – which isn’t to say that story will never be written, but there were enough flaws with the idea that it needs some serious time and attention before it’s ready for popular consumption. Others, which would have been timely if I’d managed to get them published 18 months ago, now feel a little stale and in need of a reworking that might not have mattered if so much time hadn’t gone by. Some of the stories in the collection will already have seen the light of day, and some are no longer available in their original publications.

Some of these shorts have been sitting on my hard drive for quite some time – in particular, a piece about a vampire during the Holocaust which I wrote over ten years ago and have been too self-conscious to share since then*.

Well, self, time to get over it.

It will likely be a few more weeks before the collection is ready to go, so consider this a heads-up. I have a new book coming out. It will be available both electronically (through Amazon and Smashwords) and in print (via Createspace, which also feeds into Amazon).

The title will be SHORT FRICTIONS, and I hope you will enjoy it.

Meanwhile, I am legitimately terrified, and once the finishing touches are on the publication file, I will be hiding under my quilt in bed.

 

*I still remember standing in Blackstone’s Book Shop on Charing Cross Road, back in 2002, staring at a book I wanted to buy and thinking, on my student budget, I can justify buying this if I write something about it afterwards, then it’s research and that’s totally okay. Since then I’ve shared it with a few friends, as well as an agent who said she’d be interested in reading the novel, should I ever choose to develop it into one, I just haven’t actually published it anywhere. 

Killing Net Neutrality Till It’s Even More Dead

(Courtesy: Flickr user Steve Rhodes, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, from The Nation blog)

Not long ago, the Supreme Court struck down net neutrality laws that said you couldn’t impede data from one provider being transmitted to the customer by another. At first, major players like Netflix were vocal about resisting the inevitable wave of profiteering from ISPs, but they soon went back on their commitment to a free and open internet. In particular, Netflix agreed to pay Comcast to make sure its data – your streaming movies – kept moving quickly on the information superhighway.

Now, it looks like the FCC’s going to sanction this kind of arrangement as the way forward for the internet.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s President just signed an Internet Bill of Rights into law.

Go U.S.A.

Also of interest:

Netflix’s blog on why pay-for-play is bad. (I’d have a lot more faith in them if they hadn’t said they’d fight tooth and nail against degredation of Net Neutrality post-SCOTUS case, then turned around to fork cash to Comcast, but hey, apparently we consumers have to take what we can get these days.)

Akismet vs. Disqus – A Tale of Two Comment Management Systems

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about how I felt like I was being failed by Akismet. Since posting that, I noticed an upswing in spam comments – to the tune of at least one spam comment per minute.

 

 

If you’ve left a comment on my blog lately and it didn’t show up, I’m afraid Akismet has failed me completely.

— Rachel Lynn Brody (@girl_onthego) April 21, 2014

@girl_onthego E-mail us at support@akismet.com with your site URL and/or API key, and we’ll get it figured out.

— Akismet (@akismet) April 21, 2014

When I despaired about it on Twitter, Akismet told me to email them – but several days passed without a reply, and I was taking way too much time looking through spam to make sure no comments got lost in their journey to being posted.

Fast forward to today. I mentioned again that I couldn’t get my comments to work correctly, and so had limited posting to just those who were logged in and registered. @The7thMatrix piped up:

@girl_onthego Have you tried @disqus for your site? I have it on mine and like it a lot. It does seem to have pretty good spam control too.

— The 7th Matrix (@The7thMatrix) April 26, 2014

I was hesitant to go check out Disqus because I hate having to learn new blogging tricks (I’m still stuck on working out how to make AdSense work on my site, because the last time I tried it was very confusing and frustrating, but a few minutes later a friend PM’d me on Facebook to say that she hadn’t been able to leave a comment on my last entry.

Well, that was the final straw. What was the point of not getting spam if real commenters were going to get blocked, too?!

Signing up for Disqus was so easy that at first I wasn’t sure if what I’d done had worked. But sure enough, I went back to my page and not only did the comment field look different – someone had already left a comment using the new software! Without me having to personally approve it!

So if you’re looking for an easy way to get your blog comments working more efficiently, I recommend Disqus. Highly. Will keep everyone posted if I run into any hitches, but so far, I’m pretty darn pleased.

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Just for Girls: Monopoly Edition

There are so many things I don’t like about the new Monopoly “Boutique Edition” that to list them all would be…tedious, to say the least. But I’m going to ask a few questions, starting with:

Who the f*ck are the girls playing this board game supposed to play Monopoly with?

When I was growing up, there were four people who regularly played Monopoly with me. My dad, my brother, and my two (male) cousins. We would have marathon games. When we were visiting my cousins, games would literally last all day. If I’d been playing a “just for you, girl!” edition of the game, I would have had nobody to play Monopoly with.

Monopoly isn’t an easy game, mostly because it takes so freaking long. Everything about the game takes forever. Convincing someone to play, carving out hours to get through the game – even setting it up is a chore.

The only thing I cared about? That I got to be either the dog or the dude riding the horse. Which makes me wonder – what are the “funky tokens” that come included with this for-girls version of the game? Lipsticks? Handbags? Tampons? Diaphragms?

Has the old boot become a Manolo?

Why do girls need to be condescended to like this, HasBro? You think we aren’t interested in games about money? We are very interested in games, and we are very  interested in money, maybe because we still make less of it than the boys do for doing the same job. In my experience, we’re also interested in playing games with people of all genders, because games are fun and people are fun and playing games with people is fun.

I might not find this as aggravating as I do were it not for the fact that the box explicitly states this edition is “just” for girls. Some people like pink and some of the people who like pink are indeed female. But some of them are male. And some of them aren’t binary-gendered individuals. If it’s so important to have a set that’s just for girls, why not a blue set for boys? What about a purple set for “other”? And if they’re taking it that far, why not monopoly sets based on family heritage or socio-economic status? Monopoly for Immigrants? Monopoly for Poors?

If HasBro wants to add a pink edition of Monopoly to the game’s already-bulging portfolio of properties, fine, have at it. I think it’s stupid, but it’s your company, bub. But why exclude boys who like pink, or trans kids who like pink? Why draw a box around the box and mark the territory “girls only”, as if the other versions of the game weren’t appropriate for our delicate sensibilities?  Does HasBro disapprove of inter-gender mingling? Do they feel like this pinkified version of Monopoly will encourage more girls to go to Wall Street?

Is there market research showing that girls won’t play normal-colored Monopoly? That they won’t play Monopoly with boys? Is there really that much of a demand for $30 board-games in specific shades?

Or are they just trying to grab another few bucks from Mom and Dad’s wallet?

I know which one I think it is. Which is pretty sad, but maybe expected for a game that has the point of owning everything and driving your opponent into bankruptcy.

A game, might I add, that was invented by a woman.

The MTA, the Airtrain, and Out-Of-Towners: Corporate Incompetence, or Clever Way to Add Profit?

If you take the Air Train to JFK with any regularity, you know how the $5 one-way fare can eat into your travel budget. A few months ago, I learned that you can buy a 10-ride pass for just $25, as opposed to paying $5 every time you go to or from JFK airport. If you commute to the airport for frequent travel, or are an airline employee, then paying $25 for ten rides is obviously a much better bargain than springing the full $5 every time.

Since my family does a fair amount of travelling to and from the city, we’ve started to buy the $25, 10-ride cards. Yes, there’s always the risk of losing the card between trips, but if you’re careful to keep track of it (I carry mine with my regular unlimited metrocard) then you can save 50% of the cost of travel to and from the airport from the subway stations at Jamaica or Howard Beach.

Unless, that is, you ask an MTA employee whether it’s OK to add money to your card for the regular subway. And they tell you yes. And you believe them. That happened to my sister this morning. As she made her way back to JFK, she asked a station attendant whether it was OK to add money for her subway ride to the same metrocard as her Airtrain fare. They told her yes. She took their word for it.

Upon reaching the Airtrain station, she found out that adding $2.50 for the subway ride had wiped the remaining 5 rides from her Airtrain metrocard. So she had to pay a full $5 fare to take the Airtrain to JFK, because she’s on a budget, doesn’t make a lot of money, and didn’t have an extra $25 lying around once she’d been robbed of the remaining rides on her card thanks to wrong advice from an MTA employee.

What can she do about the situation, or to get her money back? Pretty much nothing. I’ve asked her to send me a photo of the back of the card, on the chance that the MTA can trace how many rides were used from the card’s serial number, but from past experience I know that even if that’s possible, the MTA has a charge for processing refunds that makes it a waste of time to even bother. Even if you buy a card from a vending machine and it doesn’t work, they charge you enough to process the paperwork for a refund that it usually negates the amount you’d get back (unless you carry hundreds of dollars on your metro card, and who does that). I know that because several years ago when my brother and I bought cards for the Air Train and then they showed zero fare when we tried to use them, the Penn Station ticketing attendant’s advice was, “Always buy from the ticket window because if the machine messes up we can’t help you, you have to write in and they’ll charge you ten dollars per ticket to process your refund.” The Airtrain/Subway tickets we had purchased were a total of $7.50 each.

It seems wrong to me that a public service company like the New York City MTA can lie to out-of-towners with seeming impunity, with the result being that their pockets get lined by nonredeemable fares. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am angry. My sister didn’t deserve to be lied to, and if the employee had given her the correct information she still would have had to pay an extra dollar for the extra metrocard she would have had to buy, so the MTA would still be making extra money on the transaction.

I’ve sent a few tweets (included below) to both the MTA hashtag and the MTA Twitter account, and I’d just love to hear their explanation for why it was OK for their employee to give my sister false information that led to her being out a total of $17.50.

Storify story included below.

 

[View the story "NYC MTA employee's lie cheats rider" on Storify]

Why I Gave Up On @Aereo

I’m a big proponent of trying new technologies, particularly where television is concerned. I have a Hulu Plus account, a sub-account on Netflix, and the minute I found out about Aereo, I signed up for a subscription. But I don’t have it any more, because it was unreliable and when I tried to approach Aereo about getting some kind of consideration for that fact, I was completely dissatisfied with their response.

Aereo, for those who don’t know, is a product that allows you to get an aerial television signal through your computer. And DVR the broadcast shows that you want to save and watch for later. Sounds awesome, right? And it was, for the first month or two, but then shows I tried to watch live started hanging up/lagging. Dramatically. So did the shows I had DVR’d. Speed tests on my Time Warner cable line actually revealed that the speeds were perfectly in line with my internet subscription (shocker!) and should have been enough to support the highest quality video, let alone the lowest-bandwidth video quality, which by that point was all I was using (in an attempt to avoid lags). (Note: no idea if this is still the case, thanks to the courts gutting Net Neutrality and the FCC recently indicating that pay-for-play is going to be the wave of the internet’s future.)

So I went to the company and asked what was going on. Could they fix it? Since we rapidly determined they couldn’t, were they willing to refund the rest of my subscription month? I certainly wasn’t happy to pay for a service that didn’t work, even if it did let me watch SCANDAL in real time with the rest of Twitter.

But no. They weren’t willing to refund the month that it hadn’t been working. They weren’t even willing to refund the remainder of the billing month pro-rata. They offered a $2 credit, which for the several hours I had spent trying to fix the problem was laughable, particularly given that I had to reiterate my problem with every email and correct multiple incorrect assumptions on the part of their “service” staff. In fact, although they had been billing me steadily, they said that my account had expired (which they later retracted).

To add insult to injury, even though Aereo uses broadcast signals to obtain your content, it limits your ability to access that content outside of your home area. In other words, if I DVR something in New York City, I can’t play it when I travel to another part of the state, let alone another part of the country, even though if I had a TV I’d be able to access these nationally-broadcast programs no matter where I went. At the time of my subscription, this wasn’t made clear before subscribing, though they may have changed this in the months since I left the service.

As much as I approve of alternatives to expensive cable contracts, I don’t approve of companies who take consumer’s money without delivering as promised. I was willing to support Aereo as an emerging technology, early on, because (at least until the FCC kills net neutrality even deader than it appears to be at the moment) we need alternatives to costly cable packages that deliver a minimum of engaging programs.

But if your product doesn’t work as advertised, and you’re dismissing customer concerns and unwilling to negotiate equitable payback for under-performance (or lack of performance), I’m going to stop supporting it. Fast. And let my friends know not to bother, too.

So while Aereo is currently garnering headlines (not to mention Supreme Court cases) and becoming something more people consider purchasing, it’s not a service I can recommend. Having spoken to a couple people about their plans to subscribe, I realized that not everyone is aware of the abysmal customer “service” they offer, and wanted to put this out there for public consumption: unless (and until) their customer service and quality of service improve, I really don’t think this company is the one to follow where this innovation is concerned.

 

Other links of interest:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/the-cloud-industry-needs-aereo-to-win-but-consumers-need-something-better/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0