I’ve recently re-hired Time Warner Cable as my Internet and TV provider. I’m not exactly thrilled about it, since just six months ago I fired them out of frustration. I was really irritated that they didn’t have certain HD channels (History Channel principal among them). On top of that, I was seeing a few too many outages of their Internet service – with two episodes occurring at critical times when I had to deliver projects to clients. [cite Murphy's Law here] From my perspective, I should have been getting better products and services for my $125+ per month.
Six months (and one failed experiment with AT&T) later, I’ve gone back to TWC and things seem to be going fairly well. The web service has been good (in some cases very, very good – 30% higher than advertised download rate) and the HD channel selection has grown (hello, History Channel HD). What’s more, their rates have improved – to the tune of $75 per month (about $50 cheaper than when we parted ways late last year).
So I went channel surfing for some favorite TV shows, and noticed that certain channels weren’t coming up. Uh oh… no Travel or Science Channel? Seriously? Is this a joke? Well it looks like they changed their billing model when then added to their channel lineup (go figure) so I didn’t get all of the “packages of channels” that I had before. Hmmm… so that’s why my cable bill was so much cheaper. Well, if I don’t get my weekly dose of vicarious smarm from Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”, someone’s going to get their feelings hurt. I don’t watch that much TV aside from sports and news (mainly Dodgers and MSNBC, with some Lakers and local thrown in for good measure), but I definitely have a highly developed preference for those things that I *do* want to watch – and I want it in HD, no less.
You win this round, Time Warner Cable! I get to call in tomorrow to see how much I’m going to have to fork over to have the two or three HD channels I want, while paying for a few dozen others that I could care less about. If I didn’t have to use TWC for high speed Internet, they’d be *so* fired right now…
OK – well they’ve hooked me for $5 more per month – I can definitely live with that in order to get Science Channel HD, Animal Planet HD, and Travel Channel HD. I’ll be setting up my DVR to record my fave shows during lunch. Good times.