Thursday, November 06, 2008

Time Warner: Pay More, Get Less

As promised, Time Warner pulled KLRU2 from channel 20, two days after it was scheduled. (Thanks for the false hope, guys.) And sure enough, it changed to the test pattern, instead of, y'know, either putting up information about the change or replacing it with another channel.

Interestingly enough, Time Warner's "programming changes" page now has links to notifications placed in the newspaper (deep in the classifieds, where few people would see it) and sent to the city. This may have to do with the FCC's current investigation into cable companies' bad habit of moving channels from an analog tier to digital-only. (A sample letter sent to another cable company may be found here.) In the past couple of years, Time Warner has done this at least four times.

As an aside: in the past couple of years, Time Warner has doubled basic cable rates. This is not an exaggeration.

As another aside: per the article linked above, Time Warner made better than expected profits last quarter. Somehow, raising rates now strikes me as biting the hand that feeds you.

I have recently learned, in my research, that while several alternate providers are not available in my area, I can get a substantially better package than Time Warner's basic package for about $5 more per month. We're very tempted at this point.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've got Uverse coming this month to boot TWC out of my house. $30/mo cheaper for the same internet speed and nearly identical channel line up.