And so the Funimation vs Verizon Fios deal ended up badly for the viewers

On March 12th the Funimation channel was officially removed from the Verizon Fios lineup. Many sources pointed out that, after people began complaining about this sudden decision, Verizon moved the date of the change back from the 15th to the 12th of March.

It didn’t matter to Verizon that customers asked them for answers on their forums, or that they created petitions to stop the company from removing a channel they had a right to. The Funimation channel was only available to those who had the Extreme HD channel package, and the channel was actually in standard definition.

People who called Verizon’s Fios customer service mentioned time and time again that the representatives had no idea of the change, and could not provide further information.

Verizon’s excuse to remove the channel was “poor viewership;” but I ask myself, if that wasn’t a local channel, and it was part of one of the more expensive channel packages, why didn’t we have a choice to keep the channel if we wanted to? This only means that, even though we are paying for their expensive service, we have to put up with whatever they want to give us.

I’m pretty sure it all came down to money. My guess is that Verizon wasn’t making a money from the horrible as-seen-on-tv ads on that channel, and because of the “poor viewership” it had a hard time getting sponsors for it. That would make sense if they had the channel in their cheaper packages, not in the Extreme HD one.

What do we have left? Verizon inserted several on-demand channels throughout the entire lineup. I really see no reason for that, having those channels will not make me purchase movies from them. We have a ton of shopping, leisure, and travel channels that I never watch. We have a ridiculous number of PBS channels, and a ton of repeats in both SD and HD. But they don’t have what I want to watch.

I really miss the channel. Even when it wasn’t perfect, and had too many repeats, it was the only channel to provide pretty much uncensored anime shows. But the point of this is not what the channel was about, but the fact that we don’t get what we pay for; instead we only get the channels they can make money off of from commercials, even if they are part of their expensive packages.

This only shows that Verizon doesn’t care about its customers. This is just a business for them, so to them we just have to shut up and give them our money. They constantly bombard us with their “rated #1 in customer satisfaction” commercials, but I don’t see how they even come up with that rating.

The closest thing now is a K-pop channel called M-Net (channel 229). They have a “Bandai” block, but it mostly consists of reruns of Outlaw Star and other shows. I like the series, but I’ve watched it from beginning to end so many times it’s not that entertaining anymore. Forget about that, Verizon decided to move that channel to a different language package…

It’s a good thing I have access to Netflix, I can at least watch the shows they have there, and you can also find them on Hulu, or by joining their website directly.

Anyway, since I’m on a 2-year contract with them the only thing I can do is downgrade the service to a cheaper package, and later on choose a different provider. All providers move some channels to a different package at some point, but removing them is a whole different thing, and I don’t like that I don’t have a choice in the matter.