I got an Xbox 360 about a year ago with the hope of using it as a media player for my HP Media Vault because it is supposed to be a DLNA-compliant media server. It’s not. You can get it to work by installing Twonkyvision’s server on the Media Vault (which costs another $40), but it won’t stream Divx/xvid-encoded videos, which pretty much renders it useless as a media player in my opinion.
I’m not much of a gamer myself, and so the Xbox 360 hasn’t gotten much use. For some reason that I cannot recall, I decided to upgrade my Xbox 360 silver membership (which is free) to an Xbox Live Gold membership which costs about $7.99/month. I figured I could always just switch back to the free membership if I didn’t use the Gold membership features. After a while of seeing that monthly charge appear on the credit card, I decided to cancel it. I first tried canceling it on-line via the webpage for Live, then through the Xbox console, and wasted at least a half hour before searching on the Internet only to find out that that only way to cancel it is to call up 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) to wait to talk to an operator. And that took an additional 18 minutes, most of which time I was on hold.
I really hate it when a company makes such an obvious attempt to hang on to subscription fees that it causes that level of inconvenience when attempting to cancel a service. Signing up took a few minutes and I didn’t need to call anyone, but canceling took 48 minutes from my life. So I’ll post this here for three reasons:
I hope someone Diggs this and maybe it will get the attention of the person Microsoft who can correct the situation. If they do, I’ll gladly remove this from my blog.
@ Lee Devlin
I just turned my automatic renewal to ‘off’ today (April 8, 2010), so as far as I know it is working. I agree that the Membership Level screen doesn’t include this information, but if you click on the ‘Account Summary’ link, you should see 3 things:
Contact Information
Membership Level
Microsoft Points Balance
In the Membership Level, you should see the word ‘ON’ in green. Click on this word and it should take you to the appropriate screen to turn off the automatic renewal. On a side note, I was able to remove my credit card information from the Xbox site only after turning off the automatic renewal.
Also, I’m not exactly sure about this, but turning off automatic renewal may NOT be available to those people paying monthly. The explanations on the site seem to hint at that. I was using a yearly Gold subscription and these steps worked for me.
@ Sometimes Logged
Confirmed your method on my US Gold monthly account.
even got a confirmation email
QUOTE::
Dear *member id*,
Your subscription to Xbox Live Monthly Gold Membership will expire on ******, May **, 2010. To avoid a possible interruption of your subscription service, please renew your subscription by ******, May **, 2010.
To extend your subscription, just use a credit card online at this site: http://www.xbox.com/extendmembership
To check pricing details, and to confirm your account information and payment options, go to: http://billing.microsoft.com
If you have already renewed your subscription, please accept our thanks.
Thank you for using Microsoft Online Services.
Xbox LIVE Team
::QUOTE