Time Warner Cable

» see timewarnercable.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

American cable never happened in Turkey and that is worth saying at the top, because the whole thing this company was built on has no local equivalent to compare it against. There was a small state-run cable service in a few Turkish cities, but the way households here got more than four channels was a satellite dish on the balcony. Broadband arrived as ADSL over the telephone line. Coax was never the road into a Turkish apartment. So the bundle and the rented set-top box are secondhand from here, learned as a genre of American complaint rather than as a bill anybody was paying.

Time Warner Cable was assembled in 1992 out of Warner Cable Communications and American Television and Communications, both of which had ended up inside Time Warner Inc. after the 1989 merger. The Warner half had history: it had run Qube out of Columbus, Ohio from 1977, a two-way cable system with a response button on the remote. The new company built the Full Service Network in Orlando in 1994, which delivered actual video on demand to four thousand homes on set-top boxes that cost thousands of dollars each. Then it built Road Runner in 1996 and started selling cable modems, which is the product that turned out to matter.

It went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 13 February 2007 while Time Warner still held most of it, and the full separation completed on 12 March 2009 with a special dividend of $10.27 a share. Standing alone it was the second largest cable operator in the country behind Comcast, with around fifteen million customers, and the business was steadily becoming an internet provider that also sold television. Video subscribers were leaving. Broadband subscribers were not.

Comcast announced a $45.2 billion all-stock deal on 13 February 2014 and could not get it past the regulators, because the merged company would have controlled about 57 percent of American broadband capacity and nobody at the FCC or the Justice Department was willing to sign that. Comcast withdrew on 24 April 2015. Charter Communications, a smaller operator, announced its own bid a month later and closed on 18 May 2016 at $78.7 billion, picking up Bright House Networks in the same transaction.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the most hated company in america ~

This was not a figure of speech. Time Warner Cable finished at or near the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index year after year, in a sector that already scored worse than airlines. The reasons were structural: most customers had no second wireline option at their address, and the installation window was a four hour block on a weekday. The price on the bill was also not the price in the advertisement once the promotional period lapsed.

The 2013 CBS dispute is the episode people remember. A carriage fight over retransmission fees pulled CBS off the system for a month starting on 2 August, leaving roughly three million subscribers without it, including the whole of the New York and Los Angeles markets. Neither side was paying a price for the blackout except the customers, who had no way to take their business anywhere and were told to buy an antenna.

~ the name came off the trucks ~

Charter did not keep the brand for long. Rebranding to Spectrum began almost immediately after the close and the Time Warner Cable name was fully retired during 2017, along with Bright House, so three companies became one word on the side of a van. Rob Marcus, who was chief executive for the last two years, walked away from the closing with a package reported at around $80 million.

What survives is the wire. The coax that Warner Cable and ATC laid through American suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s is still the last mile into a large share of those houses, carrying a service with a different name on the bill and the same monopoly economics underneath it. The company died and the franchise did not, which is the usual shape for infrastructure: the asset outlives everyone who has ever owned it.

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