Cable-TV Marketing Company Has Sneaky Way to Get You to Not Use Xbox 360 as Your TV

Watching the "Experiment in Cord Cutting" video put out by Hill Holliday and picked up by tech blog Kotaku, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the Internet TV available on Xbox 360, Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee Box, and Roku is a sad excuse for cable. But that's assuming you can look past the fact that Hill Holliday is an advertising firm that's paid by cable companies to come up with ways to keep people from switching to new TV options.

As reported on Kotaku today, the video shows several families who agree to ditch their cable and satellite for a week and use an alternative Internet TV source instead.

The results: mass disappointment, sadness, and rage.

Here's the vid:

Experiment in Cord Cutting from Hill Holliday on Vimeo.

As the blog notes:

The one-week experiment was compiled by advertising and research firm Hill Holiday. They could run this as an ad for cable companies.

Indeed it could.

A call to Hill Holliday's office in Boston was directed to New Business Account Coordinator Meaghan O'Hara. She wasn't sure which cable companies or how many were clients of her firm (it's one of the largest advertising agencies in the country), but she said she was sure that they do represent several of them.

We're waiting to hear back on exactly which ones are clients.

UPDATE: Ilya Vedrashko at Hill Holiday says that O'Hara spoke out of turn. He says that the study was un-biased and received no funding from cable companies. Furthermore, he points people toward more information about the video:

You can find the recording of the panel here: http://bit.ly/fMeHyR (it starts with the 8th "TV gets connected" clip on the playlist that you'll find inside the video player). The event's site is at http://tvnext.hhcc.com; our blog has several posts and plenty of pictures from the event: http://www.hhcc.com/blog/

Whatever the case, when one of the largest, richest advertising firms out there puts out an "experiment" that's billed as some kind of scientific proof that one product is better than another product, it's good to be sure that the makers of the first product aren't paying them to say so.