Time Warner Cable is Greedy
Remember that line from the movie Wall Street "Greed is good, greed works"? Yeah well Time Warner Cable must have made that the company motto.
Here in Nowhere Ohio we do not have any competition to speak of for cable service. Not in the city limits at least. Outside the city there is another provider but they are pseudo satellite since no one has run coax cable out that far yet.
Consequently Time Warner can do whatever the heck they want.
To whit: recently the CW Network hit the air as a merger between UPN and the WB. Both of those stations were carried on our basic cable service. Not so the new CW. Nope. If you want the CW then you have to have digital cable. This means a digital capable TV set (or you can rent the adaptor from Time Warner of course) plus a higher cable bill. That is crap. That is the big bad cable company forcing the viewers to upgrade so that they can make more money.
The local NBC affiliate owns the broadcast rights to the WB locally and thus when the CW hit they got those rights also. But instead of keeping the same agreement that they had with the station to carry the new CW Time Warner claims that they can't carry the CW, that they don't have the right to and that the local station has to cough up more $$ to get them to carry it. (stations do pay broadcast rights to become an affiliate of a network and the cable company is supposed to carry the local affiliate stations as part of their service to the community but local affiliates do not as a rule pay the cable company)
People are not amused. The local station took out a full page ad in the paper. The mayor threw a fit.
But get this when you call the cable company Time Warner tells you oh yes they carry the CW on digital channel 700. You have to dumb it down and explain to the bimbo that you are asking them to put it back on the basic tier. It took three emails before I got someone who understood what I was saying and who answered that he'd add my request to the list. Of course he claims that they don't have the rights to carry the CW on the basic tier. Which brings us back to where we started: greed.
Gee, I wonder when the cable franchise right is up for review by city council?
Here in Nowhere Ohio we do not have any competition to speak of for cable service. Not in the city limits at least. Outside the city there is another provider but they are pseudo satellite since no one has run coax cable out that far yet.
Consequently Time Warner can do whatever the heck they want.
To whit: recently the CW Network hit the air as a merger between UPN and the WB. Both of those stations were carried on our basic cable service. Not so the new CW. Nope. If you want the CW then you have to have digital cable. This means a digital capable TV set (or you can rent the adaptor from Time Warner of course) plus a higher cable bill. That is crap. That is the big bad cable company forcing the viewers to upgrade so that they can make more money.
The local NBC affiliate owns the broadcast rights to the WB locally and thus when the CW hit they got those rights also. But instead of keeping the same agreement that they had with the station to carry the new CW Time Warner claims that they can't carry the CW, that they don't have the right to and that the local station has to cough up more $$ to get them to carry it. (stations do pay broadcast rights to become an affiliate of a network and the cable company is supposed to carry the local affiliate stations as part of their service to the community but local affiliates do not as a rule pay the cable company)
People are not amused. The local station took out a full page ad in the paper. The mayor threw a fit.
But get this when you call the cable company Time Warner tells you oh yes they carry the CW on digital channel 700. You have to dumb it down and explain to the bimbo that you are asking them to put it back on the basic tier. It took three emails before I got someone who understood what I was saying and who answered that he'd add my request to the list. Of course he claims that they don't have the rights to carry the CW on the basic tier. Which brings us back to where we started: greed.
Gee, I wonder when the cable franchise right is up for review by city council?
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