Time Warner Says People Want Metered Billing; Cablevision Says People Hate It

from the which-do-you-think-is-right? dept

As Time Warner Cable continues to roll out metered billing/capped broadband to more locations, the company's COO is apparently defending the practice by claiming that it's actually what customers want. That argument is easily demolished by Broadband Reports at the link... but it's great to contrast it with another story, also over at Broadband Reports, where Cablevision notes that metered billing confuses and annoys customers:

"We don’t want to give consumers more to think about. We think [broadband] is a pretty powerful drug and we want people to consume more of it."

While Cablevision has had its fair share of questionable practices over the years, one thing you have to admit, is that it's always been much better than a lot of other cable companies on these sorts of issues -- and often goes against what the other big cable companies do. Unlike Time Warner Cable, which caved to Hollywood about running a remote DVR service, Cablevision stood up for its rights and won (so far). The company also has gone against the grain in suggesting a la carte cable channels isn't such a bad idea. Plus, the company offered one of the first truly high speed broadband offerings, and then combined it with cheap or free additional services that helped build marketshare, rather than following the other cable companies in trying to offer every new service at a high price. And, now, it seems like it's taking the customer-centric approach to metered broadband as well (unlike Time Warner Cable, which just claims it is).

Filed Under: capped broadband, metered billing
Companies: cablevision, time warner cable

Look At That: Competition Helps Stop Broadband Caps

from the it's-all-about-the-competition dept

For years, many people have been pointing out that the real problem with broadband in the US isn't an issue of net neutrality or broadband caps, but the lack of competition. While having only two providers in a region usually isn't enough to ensure reasonable broadband practices, it may actually be working in upstate NY. While Frontier Communications has been talking about really low usage caps, it seems that now that Time Warner Cable has decided to launch capped broadband in one of Frontier's regions, the company may be thinking about going in the other direction, potentially even running a whole ad campaign about why TWC customers should switch to avoid the caps. Of course, given Frontier's previous statements about caps, it's difficult to believe that customers will be all that well protected from an eventual capped broadband anyway. But, still, this demonstrates that competition can sometimes keep these things in check. But, what you really need is more than just two players.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, competition, upstate new york
Companies: frontier communications, time warner cable

Are Cable Companies Looking To 'Emulate' Web Video Sites, Or Destroy Them?

from the face-value? dept

A piece in BusinessWeek says that cable TV companies are "pushing to become more Web-like" by expanding their online video offerings and making their core TV product work more like the web than the traditional channel-delineated system. On the face of it, this is a good thing, since we've long argued that the TV channel is an outdated concept, and should be seen as being like a web bookmark more than anything. But the article largely glosses over one key point in the cable companies' push to grow their online video efforts: they want exclusivity. So instead of throwing things open and using an ad-supported model, like Hulu, they want to take TV shows and video content, and lock it up inside a walled garden for paying customers. That's not "web-like", it's exactly the same as their current business model. Of course, even if these plans don't work out, they've got another way to try and profit from online video: by introducing capped broadband plans that will charge customers based on how much traffic they use. Time Warner's CEO is quoted in BW as saying "we really need to look at what consumers want." It's hard to imagine they want capped broadband, and they want video locked up behind paywalls. The popularity of the likes of YouTube and Hulu indicate they want something very different from what the cable operators have in mind.

Filed Under: cable companies, exclusivity, web video
Companies: comcast, cox, time warner cable

Time Warner Expands Capped Broadband Plans

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Time Warner has been testing broadband plans with traffic caps for several months, and apparently it likes what it's seen, as it plans to soon expand the caps into four more markets. The company alleges it has to switch to capped plans in order to "support the infrastructure of the broadband business," even though the supposed bandwidth crunch ISPs cite when talking about these plans is little more than a myth. As the company's CEO notes, getting the cat back in the bag by getting consumers to switch from unlimited to capped plans is going to be very difficult. Previous studies have found that even light internet users would look to take their business elsewhere if their ISP introduced caps, mainly because they have absolutely no idea how much bandwidth they're consuming. That's a good thing, because the absence of mental transaction costs helped wired broadband take off, and laid the groundwork for all sorts of innovative internet services -- not to mention lots of revenues for ISPs. Compare this to the mobile world, where per-KB or per-MB pricing helped stymie the growth of data services.

Filed Under: broadband, caps
Companies: time warner cable

No One Can Find ISPs Who Have Agreed To RIAA's 3 Strikes Plan

from the keep-looking dept

It's been a few weeks since the WSJ announced that the RIAA was supposedly dropping its lawsuit strategy, in favor of a backroom deal with ISPs, negotiated under dubious circumstances by NY's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, whereby those ISPs would start cutting off connections from those accused (not found guilty) of file sharing. However, since then, we've heard from a variety of ISPs who don't like the plan, and Wired went on a wild goose chase trying to find a single major ISP that has agreed to the plan and came up empty. Of course, most of them refused to comment. The only one who said anything straight up was Verizon -- who had earlier confirmed that it had no interest in doing a deal with the RIAA. The big cable companies and AT&T have shown some interest in the past -- but now refuse to admit that an agreement has been worked out.

The big question is why?

If this is such a great deal for consumers, as Cuomo and the RIAA insist, then why wouldn't an ISP want to step right up and proudly admit to such a deal? Obviously, it's because they know that such a deal is a sham, based on no legal reasoning, that will harm their position in the market and piss off customers. The RIAA will likely claim that no deals have been announced because the details haven't been finalized -- but again, that makes no sense. We've been questioning from the beginning why these negotiations haven't been more open. And with record labels like Warner Music and EMI insisting that they want to be seen as more open and willing to hold a "conversation" with critics, the fact that no one will talk openly about this backroom deal shows what a bunch of liars they are again. They don't want an open conversation. They want the government and ISPs to protect their business model, and they've convinced Andrew Cuomo to fall for it.

Filed Under: copyright, isps, music, takedowns, three strikes
Companies: at&t, comcast, cox, riaa, time warner cable, verizon

Viacom, Time Warner Cable Fight Over Cost Of Comedy Central, MTV

from the and-so-it-goes dept

While this happens pretty frequently, you can bet that battles like the one going on between Viacom and Time Warner Cable are going to become more and more bitter in the next few years. Unless an agreement is reached (which is likely), Time Warner Cable customers may lose access to popular Viacom channels such as MTV, Nickelodian and Comedy Central. The issue is that Viacom wants to significantly raise the costs to TWC for those stations (between a 22% and 36% price increase). TWC would just pass those costs on to consumers, and the company accurately realizes that this would seriously piss off customers at a time when customers are increasingly realizing that they can drop cable TV and just go online for much of the programming they want.

And that, actually, is part of the issue. One of TWC's big complaints is that Viacom now offers most of the shows on those channels for free online -- where TWC isn't able to get any of the associated ad revenue. The real question is who is in a stronger bargaining position. If TWC dumps Viacom stations, and people start realizing they're fine with just being able to view the content online, both TWC and Viacom will likely lose out (the ad revenue that Viacom gets online won't come close to matching the carriage fees from TWC). The whole thing is a big game of chicken, but we're going to see it play out many more times, as the relative value of the cable provider as the exclusive delivery mechanism for television content starts to decrease. Of course, that only makes the content companies want to increase prices more to make up for the loss -- and the cycle actually accelerates. Both sides stand to lose out unless new arrangements are reached.

Filed Under: cable, carriage fees, content
Companies: time warner cable, viacom

Plenty Of Broadband Providers Pretending They're Offering Fiber To The Home

from the false-advertising dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about Verizon suing Time Warner Cable over a misleading advertisement, where Time Warner Cable claims that Verizon is "catching up" to Time Warner Cable in offering fiber optics. This is misleading, at best. Verizon is installing fiber to the home with its FiOS service, providing significantly faster connections. What Time Warner Cable is claiming is that it uses fiber in its network, not to the home. It's true that TWC and plenty of other broadband providers have used hybrid fiber solutions at the network level for many years, but that's totally different than connecting all the way to the home with a fiber optic connection.

Now it turns out that TWC is hardly the only broadband provider doing this. Apparently lots of broadband providers are now running ads against Verizon where they claim that they've offered fiber for longer than Verizon. That's totally misleading. Having fiber somewhere in the network is not at all an equal comparison to running fiber all the way to the home. As Broadband Reports asks, it's difficult to see how these claims from others isn't false advertising. They're clearly implying that their fiber is the same thing as FiOS when that's not true at all.

Filed Under: fiber, truth in advertising
Companies: time warner cable, verizon

Time Warner Cable Accused Of Antitrust Violation For Requiring You To Rent Your Modem

from the illegal-tying? dept

A guy in Kansas is suing Time Warner Cable for its practice of requiring customers to "rent" their cable modem boxes. He claims that this is an illegal "tying" arrangement, since most subscribers would probably prefer to just own their modem boxes outright. Modem Box rentals have always been something of a scam. It's just a way to charge more for the monthly service, without having to include this extra "cost" in the price that they advertise to consumers. The guy is even noting that this requirement of renting a specific cable modem harkens back to when AT&T required you to rent your telephone from them. The courts struck that down, so hopefully they'll strike down this practice as well.

Filed Under: antitrust, cable modems, rentals
Companies: time warner cable

Time Warner Cable Using Incentives And Fine Print To Lock Customers Into Broadband Caps

from the read-the-fine-print dept

Back in January, Time Warner Cable admitted that it was considering adding usage caps and overage fees to broadband users. It recently started signing up new customers for these offerings (sometimes with absurdly low usage caps). Of course, it knows it can't just change existing customers over to such plans, realizing they'd be in for quite a set of lawsuits for selling people one thing and then completely changing the terms. However, it's now working on a way around this: trying to convince existing customers to upgrade to special triple play packages with "locked in" pricing for a year and then burying in the fine print that they also agree to the usage caps. Sneaky. Soon it won't be long before you won't be able to change anything on your plan without also agreeing to the new usage caps.

Filed Under: broadband caps, fine print, incentives
Companies: time warner cable

When You Measure Broadband Caps In Terms Of How Many Emails, Something's Wrong

from the that's-not-broadband dept

We've already talked about how low it appears some ISPs are making broadband "caps." Doing so seriously destroys the value of a broadband connection and will likely backfire on the ISPs who provide it. But, for those companies that are putting in place such low broadband caps -- a small suggestion: when discussing how much the caps allow, listing out how many emails you can send or receive under the cap is probably a bad idea. If the cap is so low that the number of emails is even worth mentioning, you've got a serious problem.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, cable, tiered service
Companies: time warner cable