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.
Thank you very much k0lee for posting this blog!! This kind of thing infuriates me and I’ve had it happen before three times with other businesses, being forced to waste up to one hour and 40 minutes of my day on the phone when the company clearly stated that you could cancel on their WEBSITE. I love Microsoft and their console but this is f**king ridiculous and I will now not be subscribing to the 1-dollar for one month deal. I knew $1 for one month was too good to be true, they’re hoping to cling to some $50 subscription for something that is apparently free on PS3.
Guys, Microsoft is really not the only company to do that. In fact, when you sign anything you better read carefully…
Most companies nowadays are using that method. Ex; They give you free X stuff for 6 motnhs, then they send a letter to your house,
stating that if you don’t anser back they will charge you.
What if you never get that letter? Don’t live with your parents anymor ,etc.?
It’s legal, you signed for it when you decided to accept the 6 months crappy stuff.
Be careful guys when you sign up…
not sure why everyone else is having such problems. kid made an account and got her first gold month free, it auto renewed the next month. I called and explained that my daughter did not need the gold, they canceled it & removed the info. there was no problem. but there SHOULD be a way to do it on site or xbox without having to call in i agree.