Time Warner Cable

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Time Warner Cable, Inc.
Type Public (NYSE: TWC)
Founded 1989
Headquarters Stamford, Connecticut
Key people Glenn A. Britt, Chairman and CEO
Industry Communications
Products Digital Cable
Road Runner (ISP) High-Speed Internet
Digital Phone Telecommunications
Pivot Wireless Phone Services
Time Warner Cable Media Sales Cable Advertising
NY1 News Local News Station
RNews Local News Station
Capital News 9 Local News Station
News 10 Now Local News Station
News 14 Carolina Local News Stations
 News 8 Austin
Local News Station
 Metro Sports Local Sports Station
 MetroWeather Local Weather Station
 Time Warner Sports 26 Local Sports Station
 Time Warner Sports Milwaukee Local Sports Station
Revenue ▲$9.498 Billion (2005)
Employees 84,900
Parent Time Warner
Website http://www.timewarnercable.com/

Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) (formerly Warner Cable Communications) is an American national cable television company that operates in 27 states and has 31 operating divisions. Its corporate headquarters are located in Stamford, Connecticut, and has other corporate offices in Charlotte, North Carolina; Herndon, Virginia; and Denver, Colorado.[1][2] Time Warner owns a majority of voting shares in the company, thus controlling it. On April 30, 2008 Time Warner announced that it will completely split with Time Warner Cable[3] during the fourth quarter of 2008, spinning off its 84 percent stake to shareholders.[4]

The company was honored at the 2008 Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for development of interactive Video-on-Demand infrastructure and signaling, leading to large scale VOD implementations.

Contents

[edit] History

Time Warner Cable was formed in 1989 through the merger of Time Inc.'s cable television company, American Television and Communications Corp., and Warner Cable, a division of Warner Communications. It also includes the remnants of the defunct QUBE interactive TV service. In 1995, the company launched the Southern Tier On-Line Community, a cable modem service now known as Road Runner.

[edit] Arena

In April 2008, the Charlotte Bobcats reached a naming rights deal with Time Warner Cable, the Charlotte area's only cable television provider. Under this deal, Bobcats Arena will be renamed Time Warner Cable Arena. In return, Time Warner agreed to tear up the cable television deal that had limited the Bobcats' exposure over the team's first four years. Starting with the 2008-09 season, most Bobcats games will be seen on FSN South and SportSouth in North and South Carolina[5].

[edit] Acquisition of Adelphia

On July 31, 2006, Time Warner Cable and Comcast completed a deal to purchase practically all of Adelphia's assets for $17 billion [6]. Time Warner Cable gained 3.3 million of Adelphia's subscribers, a 29 percent increase, while Comcast gained almost 1.7 million subscribers. Adelphia stockholders received 16% of Time Warner Cable. Time Warner Cable went public effective February 13, 2007, and the company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on March 1, 2007.[7]

In addition to Adelphia's coverage being divided up, Time Warner Cable and Comcast also agreed to exchange some of their own subscribers in order to consolidate key regions. An example of this is the Los Angeles market, which was mostly covered by Comcast and Adelphia, is now under Time Warner Cable. Philadelphia, previously was split between Time Warner and Comcast, with the majority of cable subscribers belonging to Comcast. Time Warner subscribers in Philadelphia were swapped with Comcast in early 2007. Similarly, the Houston area, which was under Time Warner, was swapped to Comcast [8]. In the Twin Cities, Minneapolis was Time Warner and Saint Paul was Comcast. That whole market is now Comcast.

[edit] Advance/Newhouse and Time Warner (Bright House spinoff)

Some of the regional cable system clusters operated by Time Warner Cable are owned by the Time Warner Entertainment - Advance/Newhouse Partnership (TWEAN). In 2002, Advance/Newhouse Communications, unhappy with some of the operating policies of Time Warner Cable in the AOL Time Warner era, forced a restructuring of the TWEAN partnership such that Advance/Newhouse would actively manage and operate a portion of the jointly owned cable systems equal to their percentage of equity. Under this arrangement, Advance/Newhouse enjoys the proceeds of their actively managed systems rather than simply a percentage of the partnerships total earnings. The majority of the affected systems are in the Tampa and Orlando markets under the Bright House Networks brand.

The value of this deal is that it allows Advance/Newhouse to more directly control their cable investments without having to completely unravel the TWEAN partnership, which does bring some benefits via Time Warner's development and purchasing clout.

[edit] Sprint Nextel Venture

In late 2005, TWC and several other cable companies formed a venture with Sprint Nextel. This caused TWC customers to receive a full suite of products, linking in-home and out-of-home entertainment, information, and communications services. All of this was included in the new "Triple Play On The Go", similar to the Triple Play but an addition of new services through Sprint Nextel.

[edit] Carriage controversies

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[edit] Local stations

  • On December 31, 2006 Time Warner was scheduled to drop stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group in markets TWC inherited from Adelphia. Examples of such stations are WVAH, WGME and WCHS in Charleston, West Virginia.[9]. TWC eventually came to an agreement to extend the carriage.
  • On December 15, 2006, KAYU-TV, the Fox affiliate serving eastern Washington and the Idaho panhandle, was pulled from TWC subscribers in those areas. The reason given was that KAYU had not been "negotiating in good faith" for permission to carry the channel; KAYU pulled its own signal and wants reverse compensation for its carriage. Time Warner fears that such an agreement will result in higher cable bills for its subscribers. Station officials are providing free rabbit-ear antennas to access the signal. [10] On February 1, 2008, an agreement was finally reached between the two parties that allows Time Warner to retransmit the station's feed until February 1, 2013.
  • On October 15, 2006, just hours before TWC was to drop WSAZ-TV in Huntington, West Virginia, station management and TWC came to an agreement. The key was that TWC agreed to add the new MyNetworkTV affiliate, which WSAZ carries on a digital subchannel. If no agreement was reached, WSAZ, the local NBC affiliate, would have been dropped on December 8.
  • On October 4, 2006, TWC reached a new carriage agreement with Fox Television Stations Group-owned stations KDFW and KDFI, respective affiliates of FOX and MyNetworkTV in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Before that, a message was scrolling on a leased access channel saying, "Please be advised that pending progress of ongoing negotiations, Time Warner may be forced to discontinue carriage of KDFW and KDFI. While we remain hopeful that further negotiations are being made to keep KDFW and KDFI programming in the lineup, we're letting customers know in advance of this issue." Had the stations been pulled as threatened, most Dallas Cowboys games would have been unavailable to TWC subscribers.
  • When The CW (which is half-owned by Time Warner) launched on September 18, 2006, a number of TWC systems did not carry the digital subchannels that the CW uses as affiliates in some areas. Among the stations whose subchannels are not carried on TWC are WCBD (DT2), Charleston, South Carolina; KVIA (DT2), El Paso, Texas; WLIO (DT2), Lima, Ohio; and KESQ (DT2), Palm Springs, California.
  • On May 12, 2000, ABC network owned and operated stations were unavailable to TWC subscribers for 19 hours. The pullout, in a middle of a "sweeps" period, came because TWC could not agree with ABC's parent company, the Walt Disney Company, on whether to carry some specialty channels, like ESPN Classic and SoapNet. Those tuning in to stations like WABC in New York City or KABC in Los Angeles instead saw this static message, "Disney is taking ABC away from you." Thousands of people bought antennas from Radio Shack and other stores to view ABC programs, and KABC-AM in L.A. carried the audio feed of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, then the network's highest-rated program. Amidst huge public outcry, and threats of Congressional action, TWC and ABC reached a new deal to put the ABC stations back on the systems.

[edit] Cable/on demand channels

  • On August 1, 2006, Time Warner Cable removed the NFL Network from its lineup in areas it gained from its deal with Comcast to jointly purchase bankrupt cable company Adelphia's assets and to swap certain areas it served with areas Comcast served. Adelphia and Comcast had both carried the National Football League's 24-hour network on a digital tier, however, NFL claims that Time Warner Cable now insists on making it into a premium channel on its systems.[1] As a result, NFL Network lost millions of cable households just as it is beginning a new contract to air eight regular-season games a year. On August 3, 2006, the FCC ordered Time Warner Cable to reinstate the NFL Network on those systems from which it had removed the channel, upholding the complaint that they had failed to comply with the required 30 day notice period required to be given to customers, before removing a channel.[2] After considering its options, Time Warner Cable restored the channel at midnight on August 4, 2006, with an onscreen notice warning the viewers the channel would be removed in 30 days. Time Warner Cable issued a petition to the FCC in an attempt to reverse the decision citing "severe, immediate and irreparable harm" to Time Warner Cable and its customers, and threatening legal action if the FCC did not reach a decision by 10am on August 7, 2006. On that day, the FCC responded to Time Warner Cable's petition by upholding the Commission's initial ruling that the NFL Network remain on the air for the required period. After two extensions of the deadline, TWC finally pulled the plug on September 15, 2006. "We will continue to negotiate and remain hopeful that an agreement will be reached that is beneficial to all", the network said in a statement that flashed on the screen in place of NFL Network. TWC did agree to carry a free preview from December 24 to December 30, primarily so that local viewers could watch the Rutgers Scarlet Knights play in the Texas Bowl, but no longterm agreement has been reached.
  • On November 1, 2006, Starz! On Demand became available to some TWC subscribers. This came as a result of settlement of a long running dispute over its carriage. Starz! required this to be free to their subscribers, however, Time Warner Cable insisted on packaging all Premium On Demand channels in a separate tier which would require an additional monthly fee for Starz subscribers. The channel is still not available in the "Capital Region" around Albany, New York, among other places.
  • In another on-demand development, TWC had to modify "Dodgers on Demand", a joint venture with the Los Angeles Dodgers, on its systems in the Los Angeles area. In September of 2006, Major League Baseball ordered TWC to remove the service, saying that MLB Advanced Media has rights to all interactive content taken from its games. TWC and the Dodgers responded by removing most highlights, excluding those from the team's 2006 Division Series loss to the New York Mets, which came from a newscast on KCBS.
  • Time Warner Cable is the only major cable or satellite TV provider not to offer GolTV (soccer channel)[11].
  • In the spring of 2007 VH1 Soul, MTV Jams and MTV Hits, were briefly dropped from Time Warner Cable's lineup in Southern California when those franchises transitioned from Adelphia and Comcast. However all three channels returned to that lineup within a couple of months, under a new, specialized tier of service. To date however, the three networks remain conspicuously absent from many of Time Warner and Brighthouse Networks' systems, most notably in New York City, as well as both major satellite TV providers (DirecTV and DISH Network, respectively).

[edit] Channels

[edit] Cable Clusters

Info as of 12/31/05. More than 75% of the company's customers are in systems of 300,000 subscribers or more.

These numbers do not reflect the addition of 3.5 million Adelphia customers as of August 1, 2006.

[edit] Divisions

Time Warner Cable's 56 Divisions, from Time Warner's 2007 Corporate Profile and from official website.

  • Oceanic Time Warner Cable (Hawaii)
  • Time Warner Cable Alabama
  • Time Warner Cable Albany
  • Time Warner Cable Austin
  • Time Warner Cable Barstow
  • Time Warner Cable Binghamton
  • Time Warner Cable Buffalo/Niagara
  • Time Warner Cable Charlotte
  • Time Warner Cable Central KY/Madison, IN
  • Time Warner Cable Cincinnati +
  • Time Warner Cable Clarksburg
  • Time Warner Cable Dayton/Miami Valley +
  • Time Warner Cable Desert Cities
  • Time Warner Cable Eastern Carolina (Wilmington)
  • Time Warner Cable Erie
  • Time Warner Cable Fort Benning
  • Time Warner Cable Greensboro
  • Time Warner Cable Hudson Valley
  • Time Warner Cable Jackson, MS/Monroe, LA
  • Time Warner Cable Kansas City
  • Time Warner Cable Los Angeles North
  • Time Warner Cable Los Angeles Metro
  • Time Warner Cable Los Angeles South
  • Time Warner Cable Mid-Ohio (Columbus)
  • Time Warner Cable Myrtle Beach
  • Time Warner Cable National (non-clustered systems)
  • Time Warner Cable Nebraska (Lincoln)
  • Time Warner Cable New England (Portland, ME and Berlin and Keene, NH)
  • Time Warner Cable New York and New Jersey
  • Time Warner Cable North Texas (Dallas-Fort Worth) (formerly Comcast)
  • Time Warner Cable Northeast Ohio (Akron)
  • Time Warner Cable Northeastern Wisconsin (Green Bay)
  • Time Warner Cable Raleigh
  • Time Warner Cable Rochester
  • Time Warner Cable San Antonio
  • Time Warner Cable San Diego
  • Time Warner Cable South Carolina (Columbia)
  • Time Warner Cable Southeastern Wisconsin (Milwaukee)
  • Time Warner Cable Southern California
  • Time Warner Cable Southern Tier New York
  • Time Warner Cable Southwest (El Paso, Wichita Falls, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Border Corridor, Golden Triangle, Kerrville, Rio Grande Valley, and South Central)
  • Time Warner Cable Southwest Florida
  • Time Warner Cable Southwest Ohio (Miami Valley & Cincinnati)
  • Time Warner Cable St. John
  • Time Warner Cable Syracuse
  • Time Warner Cable Terre Haute
  • Time Warner Cable Wisconsin (Milwaukee & Green Bay)

+ In August 2006, Time Warner Cable merged Dayton & Cincinnati into "Southwest Ohio" and moved much of the former Dayton customers in Northwest Ohio north of a line running from Mercer & Auglaize counties to the Mid-Ohio (Columbus) division.

[edit] Former divisions sold to Comcast

  • Time Warner Cable Houma (Merging with Comcast)
  • Time Warner Cable Houston (Now Comcast Houston)
  • Time Warner Cable Lake City/Live Oak (Merging with Comcast)
  • Time Warner Cable Mid-South (Memphis, TN, AR, and MS) (Now Comcast)
  • Time Warner Cable Minnesota (Now Comcast)
  • Time Warner Cable Shreveport (Now Comcast)
  • Time Warner Cable St. Augustine/Palatka (Now Comcast)

[edit] Statistics

As of December 31, 2006, there were 13.4 million basic cable subscribers, 7.3 million Digital cable subscribers, 7.0 million Road Runner residential subscribers, 2.5 million DVR subscribers, and 1.9 million Digital Phone subscribers. [12]

Time Warner Cable remains the only Time Warner division to use the Time-Warner "Eye and Ear" logo designed to symbolize TW's video- and audio-based divisions and first used briefly when the company formed in 1990.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Yahoo! Finance Time Warner Cable profile. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  2. ^ Company Highlights. Time Warner Cable. Retrieved on 2007-03-13.
  3. ^ Time Warner plans to split of cable services. Reuters.
  4. ^ AP. Time Warner's $9 Billion Cable Spinoff. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  5. ^ Deals widen Bobcats' TV reach. Charlotte.com (2008-04-09). Retrieved on 2008-04-16.
  6. ^ CNNMoney.com: Time Warner to save on programming costs after Adelphia Deal - Jul, 31. 2006
  7. ^ Time Warner Press Release: Time Warner Cable Becomes a Public Company
  8. ^ ABC KTRK/Houston: Time-Warner Cable leaving Houston
  9. ^ Sinclait Broadcasting Group: Letter informing viewers of termination of Sinclair station broadcasts to Time Warner Cable-purchased Adelphia customers
  10. ^ BroadcastingCable.com: Northwest Station Pulls Signal in Retransmission Battle
  11. ^ Cable providers offering GolTV
  12. ^ Time Warner: Time Warner Cable Fact Sheet

[edit] External links

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