It generally sucked. I was the sysadmin and the whole system was maintained with near end of life or end of life equipment. I fell into doing the renewal contracts for programming because I maintained the channel maps. The worst were viacom, paramount and espn. What a bunch of opportunist trash. I started in late 2008 before netflix hit and watched the price go up as the subscribers for TV went down. I battled the old school notions of cable while watching the owner and his cronies flail about without understanding the changes. They couldn’t understand why we were topping out on bandwidth every night and I tried to tell them that people were actually using it now. They wouldn’t pay for any type of proxy. They also at first wouldn’t pay for more bandwidth. They had a absurd user to bandwidth calculation in their head from ten years before and were slow to recognize that what was true then wouldn’t stay that way.
I did predicted how it would end up though. Cable isn’t gone like everyone said it would be but many cable companies have dumped video completely. There is no profit in carrying video. I knew that netflix wouldn’t remain the only game in town and that all those cord cutters would soon be faced with similar bills to keep the same amount of access to programming in the end. I was told I was wrong by both sides of it and I have to say the smug from being right about it all hasn’t earned me one dime. All in all I’m glad I’m out it.
What was it like working in the cable TV industry? Did it pay good and have good benefits?
It generally sucked. I was the sysadmin and the whole system was maintained with near end of life or end of life equipment. I fell into doing the renewal contracts for programming because I maintained the channel maps. The worst were viacom, paramount and espn. What a bunch of opportunist trash. I started in late 2008 before netflix hit and watched the price go up as the subscribers for TV went down. I battled the old school notions of cable while watching the owner and his cronies flail about without understanding the changes. They couldn’t understand why we were topping out on bandwidth every night and I tried to tell them that people were actually using it now. They wouldn’t pay for any type of proxy. They also at first wouldn’t pay for more bandwidth. They had a absurd user to bandwidth calculation in their head from ten years before and were slow to recognize that what was true then wouldn’t stay that way.
I did predicted how it would end up though. Cable isn’t gone like everyone said it would be but many cable companies have dumped video completely. There is no profit in carrying video. I knew that netflix wouldn’t remain the only game in town and that all those cord cutters would soon be faced with similar bills to keep the same amount of access to programming in the end. I was told I was wrong by both sides of it and I have to say the smug from being right about it all hasn’t earned me one dime. All in all I’m glad I’m out it.