Participant Observations 12/12/17 - Returning the Fox Box

I just had a really funny conversation with the woman at my local newsagent. I'll explain how it came about:

So I got an email from Foxtel this week, saying the voluntary account suspension of my satellite service was about to end, and that they would start to charge me for it again.

Having been with the Foxtel OTT service now for about the same length of time, and not particularly unhappy with what I'm getting, I decided that I would terminate the satellite service. So I called them up, and cancelled the service, but not before they again tried to pitch to me some deals to stay with them. Iit was too late for that.

So they sent me an email with details about how to return the Fox Box. I printed off the label that came attached in the email, packaged up my Fox Box, and walked it up the road to the designated dispatch point - my local newsagent. (For those who didn't know, getting a Foxtel Subscription does not buy you the Box - you effectively only rent it during your subscription)

I walked into the newsagent, and said, "I understand I can drop this off here to be returned to Foxtel?"

"Yeah, that's right," she said. She then took the package out to some back room. On her way back to the counter, a thought flashed through my mind.

I asked, "Do you get many of these dropped off here?"

She looked at me in a knowing kind of way, and said, "Yeah, we get heaps. Probably 6 to 7 a week, ever since Netflix and all them other ones came along."

I said something like, "Fair dinkum. They must get a lot of churn I reckon."

She countered with, "Yeah, they have to do something about their pricing or something to stop it."

It was an informal yet fascinating validation that the traditional Foxtel business model is in crisis. It in turn led me to two other thoughts:

1) A comment one research participant said in an interview, where they said Foxtel's business model used to be about just bombarding people with as many content as possible, literally 100's and 100's of channels. It probably also reflects an ideology of "Content is King", which I think may no longer be the case. It's been said to me more recently that "User experience is now King." Which now seems more apt.

2) It also reminded me of the 5 weeks I worked as a telemarketer for Austar (which became Foxtel) waaaaay back in 2002. One of the selling points of our pitch, we were told, was to talk about the number of channels we had, year round.

But the conversation with the newsagent lady was an informal validation of the changing media landscape. Sometimes I fucking love my research and where it leads me.