Time Warner Cable

So I’m thinking I need a new blog category for “rants.” Although this one at least has a somewhat satisfactory ending, which I’m sharing in case others can benefit.

With our triple-play Time Warner Cable bill approaching $200 a month, I called to see what I could do to lower the rate. The account representative wasn’t impressed with my idle threat to cancel service (at least for now, TWC cable is the only game in town – DIRECTV isn’t satisfactory, and Verizon Fios seems as mythical as unicorns). So I asked about canceling various services that appear individually on my bill, starting with something called Starz, which I had gotten for free as a promotion and which somehow started being billed at $8/month. Gone. Could I get rid of the Sports Programming surcharge of $2.75/month (which they recently started bundling with the Broadcast TV surcharge of $2.25/month)? No. Consider it like the ‘resort’ fee hotels use to keep their room rates artificially lower, or the ‘snow removal fee’ Maggie Brooks instituted to give the appearance of not increasing Monroe County taxes (wait, that’s a different rant…). OK, what about the separate charges of $1.97 and $2.97 for the program guide? Could I rent the cable box without the guide? No. So why break the price out separately? Don't go there.

What the representative did suggest was that I could purchase an Apple TV and use it to replace one of my cable boxes (we have two, and to get the HD service, you must keep at least one box). At a price of $64.99 at Best Buy ($69.99 in their stores, but they’ll match their internet sale price. Seriously?), this seemed like a no-brainer; the Apple TV would pay for itself in less than a year, and I’d have lots of additional functionality. Once installed, I was thrilled to be able to open the TWC TV app on my iPad and watch the programming on the TV through AirPlay. But when I later tried to repeat the process to show my husband, it no longer worked. The error message was cryptic: “TWC TV does not currently support HDMI video out from this device. Please disconnect HDMI to continue using TWC TV.” I called two different TWC customer service numbers, and was told that I had been misinformed by the account rep. One technical support person said a Roku would work, but not Apple TV. I called later in the week to complain about the misinformation, and to verify whether the Roku really would work (and to ask why the Apple TV seemed to work for a few random minutes). The first rep transferred me to a special technician, who said definitively that TWC doesn’t work with Apple TV, but they’re working on it. He apologized for the confusion, and said he would make sure the account people stopped misinforming customers. Then, on a lark, he suggested I try turning “mirroring” off. Tada! My TV was now displaying the channel from my iPad app. So the account representative had been right, and all of the technical people I’d spoken to were wrong. Things have gotten so complex that even the “experts” don’t always know the right answer.

We're not ready to cut the cable cord completely, even though we watch only a small fraction of the "hundreds" of channels, because many of them require an additional subscription, many others are redundant, and still others are in foreign languages. But returning one cable box feels like a huge victory in the battle against the cable monopoly. I urge any of you with more than one box to explore doing the same. It takes a little getting used to, but it's worth it for the satisfaction of giving a little less of your money to Time Warner Cable CEO Robert Marcus...