Bell Canada, After Nixxing Most Hardware DVR, Changes Cloud PVR Recording Retention
We’ve written about Bell Canada plenty over the years and not typically for good reasons. This is a company that wanted to ban VPNs to combat people getting around geo-blocked content, has a habit of acting petulant when it comes to regulators, and has engaged in other consumer-unfriendly practices. So, not the best reputation when it comes to treating its own customers, and the larger public, particularly well. You can think of them as something like a Canadian version of Comcast in the States.
As you might expect from a company that likes to wield a heavy hand, Bell Canada has been removing the ability for subscribers to use 3rd party DVRs in their homes, pushing people instead to use its cloud-based PVR platform to record content instead. Customers that signed up for that did so under an advertisement of a 1 year retention policy on recorded content.
Until today, that is, when Bell Canada announced and will begin enforcing a 60 day retention instead. Suprise!
On May 1, Fibe TV will automatically delete recordings stored on its Cloud PVR (personal video recorder) offering once the recordings hit 61 days of age, as confirmed by Canadian online newspaper Daily Hive. Currently, customers maintain access to recordings stored via Cloud PVR for 365 days.
Fibe TV apparently started alerting customers of the upcoming change this month.
A Bell Canada spokesperson, Jacqueline Michelis, minimized the idea of disruption to customers, telling Daily Hive: “The viewing of nearly all recordings takes place within 60 days, so there is minimal impact to customers.” Michelis didn’t provide more details on how Bell Canada arrived at this conclusion.
That last bit isn’t surprising considering just how many people are jumping into Bell support forums to express just how pissed off they are about this. And the flippant comments from the spokesperson don’t even bother to address the fact that Bell customers were told there would be one retention policy only to find out that it got 5/6th shorter now that they’ve signed up. There’s a term for that and it’s called a bait and switch.
And it doesn’t seem like Bell can even get implementing this right. While Bell has also made comments about this being a way to free up storage space, that certainly isn’t the case on the actual end user side.
Customers have turned to Bell Canada’s online support forum to share their discontent with the changes, with some saying that they don’t align with the services they expected to receive when signing up for Fibe TV. Thankfully, Bell Canada won’t be able to delete recordings stored on DVR hardware inside customers’ homes.
Other complaints are coming from users whose recordings are being deleted even when they haven’t come close to maxing out their cloud storage or if their recordings aren’t available on demand.
A user going by camisotro on Bell Canada’s online support forum called the announcement “absolutely ridiculous” and condemned what they perceived to be years of telecoms pushing back against users’ ability to record content.
To be clear, the cloud PVR costs money. $10/month, to be exact. And again, that subscription was sold with customers understanding that content would have a 1 year retention. How in the world this would not result in some kind of class action lawsuit on behalf of consumers is entirely beyond me.
Bell Canada competitors are already out with public comments committing to their own 1 year retention on cloud-based content recordings. I would imagine those competitors will have some new customers in very short order.