Love the catchy name, and the idiotic acronym that goes with it. Why not just call it what it is, Impulse Ordering? Maybe because that’s too transparent. This is just a way to capitalize on the impulse nature of society these days. Notice the little blurb about Game of Thrones and award winning movies. Just marketing speak to entice you to buy the package on impulse. Been able to do this with digital cable now for probably 10 years or so.
Four or five years ago, I was at my mother in laws house (who was in her early 70s) and noticed she had Too Much TV, which is an On Demand service from InDemand with Girls Gone Wild type programming for $15/month. I asked her if she ordered it and she looked at me like I had two heads. Instead of contacting TWC support, I asked a TWC manager I know locally to look into it and he confirmed that the service was ordered via remote and gave me the time to the exact second the purchase was confirmed. I brought it up to my MIL and after initially denying it, then me explaining it and her having to think about it for a few minutes, a lightbulb went off and she mentioned she dropped the remote and upon picking it up accidently hit some buttons and saw some screen she never saw before and did everything she could to figure out how to get off of it and just started pressing buttons.
While the manager I know doesn’t work in sales or billing, he said just by talk about the office this ‘feature’ causes so many problems, increased call center volume and a lot of service credits, it really isn’t worth it. At a customer’s request, they will block impulse ordering.