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…
