Talk:Vidéotron

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Vidéotron once held a franchise in West and South East London for a number of years before being taken over by Cable and Wireless. Does anyone have the dates for when this service started, and also when it finished? KrisW6 23:59, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Translation of history

I just translated the history from French. A lot of it seems pretty flakey, and it read like a copyvio, but I make no judgement on what's worth keeping, if any of it. I'm just sayin' it's done. Lord Bob 05:21, September 8, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Opening remarks

In the opening remarks of the Videotron pages, there is a paragraph that is currently in dispute over its neutrality. I thought I would begin the discussion on this matter.

Quoting from that paragraph "Videotron presently has a monopoly on video service in Quebec." There are two facts that make this comment somewhat disturbing. First of all, Videotron is not provided EVERYWHERE in Quebec. Though where it is offered, it does have a monopoly of sorts, Videotron does not offer services across the province. Secondly, where it does contain the "monopoly" is on cable distribution, where Videotron is permitted to offer services, (Montreal, Quebec City and most places in between). However, this is a monopoly that is obliged by the CRTC to avoid overlapping and intertwining cable wires creating a spider-web-like areal view of the cities. This said, Videotron does not have a monopoly on the services it offers, only on the means these services are rendered to the client. There are many competetors that offer satelite television, DSL-internet and the various other products Videotron offers.

"Because of this it is widely known that Videotron's customer service is sub par at best." Actually, other than the waiting periods (to be discussed further on) and Videotron required not to accomodate the customer's every request due to certain laws and regulations...Videotron is renowned for its customer service department as one of the best in the province of Quebec, and among the cable providers of North America.

"People have recalled waiting on hold for an hour for service with a problem." With well over 1,500,000 and only 1,000 or so customer service agents...some would argue that an hours waiting time is fairly efficient. However this being said, the waiting time at Videotron is on average 5-15 minutes at most, with there quite often being no waiting time at all. The only times it exceeds these times is when there is a power failure or the cable is not available in an entire region...then it is more than likely that most of the clients in that certain region will all be calling simultaneously. There are also various seasons where 35-60% of the customer base contact Videotron ... November-January, to take advantage of the Christmas season promotions ... May-July, during moving season.

"Videotron also offer mediocre content for it's hundreds of thousands of English subscribers." I am not exactly certain what this is supposed to mean. If we are talking about classical (analogical) cable, then in most regions English television stations are 40-50% of the total channel content, and in some regions going as high as 75% English channel distribution. As for Illico (digital) cable, English channels outnumber French channels 5:1. As far as the content on the various stations, Videotron has no control on what shows the various stations wish to broadcast or not.

"Often running films on its "Video On Demand" service that are direct to video releases." Laws and regulations forbid Videotron to broadcast movies before they are available on DVD. The Video on Demand service is a means of renting movies without leaving the comforts of your home to travel to the video store. An additional advantage is that there is no need to worry about late fees, as the video is simply blocked from broadcasting after the predetermined amount of time has expired.

"It's commonly known that if Toronto based Rogers Video were able to penetrate the Quebec market, Videotron would lose the majority of its English subscribers." Facts are that Rogers Video did attempt to penetrate the Quebec market, and no more than 1-2 years after it did...all of it's video outlets and product services were either bought up or overtaken by none other than Videotron.

Blipadouzi 14:31, 19 December 2006 (UTC)