I don’t think that’s realistic. As you’ve said elsewhere, Internet is their highest margin product (possibly on the order of 70%) and is increasingly the most important part of the all-in-one bundles of TV / Internet / Phone. Dropping offering Internet service to save the video product would be supremely stupid.

The complex reality of their situation is that they have an expensive albatross of a video product that they’d probably love to see succeed but rather see a trend away from traditional cable packages to online video. At the same time, TWE – a related entity to TWC – has a ton of content that it wants to monetize through their video product so it would be stupid to get rid of video for that reason too.

TWC currently does offer some streaming video (for pay I believe) through their own portal, but as most people have not heard about it I suspect it’s not very popular. This service (along with their digital phone and other network-based services they offer) goes to show they are not truly concerned about bandwidth being limited or bottlenecked. It’s really all about finding a way to monetize content they don’t own, and monetizing the free parts of the Internet in general.

Why give something away for free when you can charge for it, right?

That’s what I plan on doing when I can remember to call during their 9-5 business hours (usually I’m working or driving to/from work then).

They realize that they make money by distributing content, and they want to distribute it by any means possible. If they were so darned worried about internet content disrupting their “core” video business, then they’d just not offer internet.

More importantly, they wouldn’t be trying to figure out ways to stream network broadcasts live online. They see the potential in Hulu and Netflix (who also don’t create content) and want to be in that business.

Online, via fiber, via coax, via strings on cans, these companies predominantly make money by serving other people’s content. If they’re faced with a lower revenue model versus extinction, they’ll take the former.

I was fed up with ComCast’s service and dropped them for AT&T voice/DSL and satellite for video. I’ve got 5 statics with AT&T and enough speed to run a web server as well as doing my normal internet schtuff.

My upstream isn’t as fast, but I don’t have to deal with ComCast’s absolutely atrocious service anymore, and the price is lower. So….

Quitcherbitchin’, as they say.

As far as speed…with my DSL connection running between 6 and 7 megs, I am watching strreaming video just fine. Everything works the same way as it did before when I did have Roadrunner a few weeks ago. Except I don’t have the Speedboost gimmick and 9 megs regular download speed that I had with them.

That said, TWC will lose customers anyone that there is competition, and enough that it will make a difference.

I know this will pass if it happens, but I don’t want it to happen. The longer we can hold this stuff out, the more young voters happen, and the easier it will be to legislate these guys to hell so they can’t.