Time Warner's HBO fee upsets customers
Time Warner Cable has notified HBO subscribers in the Triad that beginning Sept. 30 they will need a digital cable box for each television set to view the premium movie channel.
The cable company says that by moving HBO from its analog roster to its digital channel list, it is freeing up more cable space to add high-definition channels.
But some subscribers say it’s a way to force them to pay $8.95 a month to rent a box for each TV in the house.
“My view of it is they’re taking a franchise that they have and they’re finding a way to take and mine at least another 100 and some odd bucks a year out of the people they have,” Greensboro subscriber Frank Wood said .
Wood, a digital cable subscriber, has a digital converter box for his main television set, which provides HBO on channel 5 as well as on several HD channels above channel 400.
But he has several smaller TVs around his house, which get about 70 channels, including HBO on channel 5.
After Sept. 30, the only way he’ll be able to watch HBO on the other TV sets is to have a cable box for each set.
Time Warner said the move is not intended to inflict hardship on customers.
And the company is offering a free set-top cable box for a year for one TV to anybody with a basic cable package.
“By moving this from the basic tier to the digital tier we’re able to provide more programming by freeing up bandwidth,” said Melissa Buscher, director of media relations for Time Warner Cable’s Carolina Region.
She said that only about 2 percent of Time Warner’s more than 380,000 subscribers in the Triad subscribe to HBO through basic cable.
Cable subscribers have said overall that they want more high-definition programming, she said, and Time Warner wants to expand from the current 63 HD channels to 100 by the end of the year.
It will add four more channels to that lineup on Aug. 25, she said: CBS College Sports HD, Fox News HD, Fox Business HD and Fuse HD .
Wood is worried, however, that Time Warner will slowly move channels away from its analog transmission — the signals that don’t require a set-top box — so that he’ll eventually be forced to rent boxes for all of his TVs.
He considers that a needless expense intentionally created by the company to bring in a fee for every TV set in a home.
“What’s the next piece of content this is going to happen to?” the retiree said. “This is their model of shifting their business ... from content per house to content per TV.”
Buscher said Time Warner’s move is not driven by revenue. HBO is a niche movie channel, she said, and Time Warner is not interested in stripping basic and analog cable of its channels of broader interest, such as CNN.
“By moving the channel, we’re not looking at it as a revenue strategy,” she said. “We’re looking at it as a way to offer more products and services. Anytime you can offer more products and services to your customers the happier your customers are going to be.”
Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com
Accompanying Photos
Photo Caption: Time Warner Cable office off Spring Garden Street in Greensboro.
Search News-Record.com
closeSearch News & Record Article Archives
Not all of the newspaper's content appears online.
*There is a fee for downloading some older articles.
