Relying On Performance Of 'Strangers'

As we all know in the new digital era, when it comes to a product's performance the consumer electronics industry is even more beholden to outside industries than ever before. I was reminded of this recently when I heard two unrelated stories from consumers.

A family in northern New Jersey recently replaced a 21-year-old, 25-inch color set with a 50-inch rear-projection digital TV. The family decided against a cheaper big-screen analog set, because they knew that DTV was the wave of the future and that their cable provider, Cablevision, would soon be moving to digital. In the meantime, they bought a progressive scan DVD player to enjoy the full capabilities of the set.

But the family wanted similar performance when they watched cable TV. They noticed a couple of months after buying the new TV that Cablevision's analog service was getting worse. The high performance of the new set only magnified the problem. The husband called Cablevision to complain about the analog signal to his house and asked when his town would be scheduled for DTV. He was disturbed with the answer — two years. When he complained, the Cablevision rep said, "Hey, I could be wrong. It could be five years."

Without Cablevision and little over the air HDTV programming available in his area, the consumer turned to DirecTV. The satellite provider and a local retailer separately visited the house and came back with the same report: too many trees. They couldn't install a dish unless the homeowner was ready to spend a lot more money pruning or cutting down trees. The whole experience has made the family wonder if they made a mistake in buying the new digital set instead of a relatively inexpensive analog big screen.

Another family, frustrated with the slow connections to the Internet using conventional dial-up, turned to DirecTV DSL and bought a box from the supplier online. The consumer selected DirecTV based on their great experience with its DBS service. The installation, which should have taken 15 minutes, went on and on, in fits and starts, for about two weeks due to the local phone company, Verizon. The problem was that the home was "too far away from our distribution hub to provide DSL service," Verizon said.

While DirecTV pushed Verizon, who sells its own DSL service, to rewire the consumer's connection to the distribution hub, the consumer reluctantly had to return the DSL to DirecTV, because the rewiring didn't work. (Turning to the local cable company, TimeWarner, for cable modem service, the consumer was told that its Road Runner service is not yet available in the area.)

In both cases, even though the performance of the equipment by consumer electronics manufacturers was never an issue, the frustration level was so intense that the result may be that consumers will balk the next time they are interested in a new technology.

Situations like this put the CE industry in what I would call the Blanche DuBois position, the character from Tennessee Williams' play "A Streetcar Name Desire" who says at one point, "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers."

Well these strangers aren't so kind, and they are hindering acceptance of the industry's products. Getting consumers to understand and then purchase new digital products is one thing, but to have the ineptitude of other industries hinder their performance is another. CE manufacturers are still beholden to other industries to make their products work. Until those industries meet the performance standards CE manufacturers have set, with federal regulatory agencies pushing them to improve performance, consumers will either be frustrated and/or reluctant to buy new technologies from this industry.