Time Warner Cable is letting victims of recent devastating storms spend their time and energy worrying about rebuilding their lives and not ponder the loss of company-owned cable boxes, modems, and other equipment.

Unlike several smaller cable companies that have hounded customers for cable equipment destroyed in storms, fires, and other natural disasters, Time Warner is signaling they are waiving any lost/damaged equipment fees when tragedy strikes.

Many cable operators expect to recoup lost or damaged equipment from proceeds of insurance claims, and relentlessly bill clients for the full value of equipment that may have melted in a fire or blown blocks away in a tornado.  While homeowner and rental policies traditionally cover this equipment, few customers are in a state of mind to worry about a DVR box or cable modem, and some may have to wait weeks or months for restitution from the insurance company.

Stop the Cap! reader Kathleen is now an extended guest at a Kentucky “extended stay” motel after her house was damaged by a tornado several days ago.

“I’m an organized person and I had my emergency planning kit ready to go, calling the insurance company, the utilities, and the cable company, among others, to make sure everything was documented,” Kathleen writes. “Our DVR box and cable modem are probably sitting in a field in southern Ohio right now, as the storm completely took away our family room.”

Kathleen originally was planning to write complaining Time Warner wanted several hundred dollars for the lost equipment because that is what the first representative told her.

“But 20 minutes after that call, a supervisor called us back and profusely apologized, telling us the representative was not supposed to charge for the lost equipment because of the storm,” Kathleen says. “They got themselves a lot more loyalty from me than that equipment ever cost them because they did the right thing by me and my family.”

Kathleen tells us Time Warner has stopped all charges on her account, offered her their good wishes for a recovery, and will waive any installation costs to get her service back up and running when repairs are complete.

“Following the horrific storms of last week, Time Warner Cable immediately suspended all credit and collections work in the area,” a spokesperson tells Stop the Cap! “Time Warner Cable has not and will not charge customers for lost or damaged equipment as a result of these storms.”

“It is why I will call Time Warner back when this is all over and will stick with them because they stuck with us,” says Kathleen. “Sorry AT&T.”

[Consumer Tip from Stop the Cap!: Every renter should always have renter’s insurance, which typically will cover damaged cable equipment. It’s very affordable and protects renters from losses. Many consumers believe landlords carry insurance which will protect them in the event of a natural disaster or fire, but those insurance policies protect the landlord’s property, not renters’ possessions.]

Time Warner Cable's usage meter.

Time Warner Cable today relaunched usage-based billing, offering customers a $5 monthly discount off Internet access when they confine their usage to a maximum of 5GB per month.

Stop the Cap! was at the forefront of protesting Time Warner’s last Internet Overcharging experiment in 2009, which would have allowed unlimited access for $150 a month — a major rate increase to be sure.  Other customers had usage allowances that originally would have ranged from 40-60GB per month, with overlimit fees of $1/GB or more.

Time Warner Cable’s Jeff Simmermon, director of digital communications, admitted the 2009 experiment attempted in Beaumont, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas, Greensboro/Triad, N.C., and Rochester, N.Y. was unsuccessful.

“Yes, we did try this before, a few years ago,” Simmermon said. “And yes, pretty much everyone agrees that it didn’t go so well. So we listened to customer complaints. A lot.”

The cable company is trying again in southern Texas, including the cities of San Antonio, Laredo, Corpus Christi, the Rio Grande Valley and the Border Corridor.

This time Simmermon says the usage-based pricing program for Time Warner Cable customers will be optional. He also promised Time Warner Cable customers will always have access to unlimited broadband at a flat monthly rate.

This is a major change for the cable company, because earlier statements from both CEO Glenn Britt and the chief financial officer Irene Esteves called usage based billing inevitable.

Simmermon admitted Time Warner Cable is making plenty of money selling unlimited access to customers today.

Simmermon

“We profit from unlimited consumption, and a free, open Internet is the sort of Internet that has gotten us this far,” Simmermon wrote on the company’s blog.

“All participation in the Essentials plan is opt-in, with the opportunity to save a few dollars each month,” Simmermon said. “It’s not going to be for everybody, and that’s fine — all Time Warner Cable customers will still have the option of selection an unlimited broadband plan.”

The details:

1) Up to 5GB/month of data transmission for a $5/month discount from one’s current monthly bill. All Standard, Basic and Lite broadband customers will be eligible. Turbo, Extreme and Wideband customers will continue as always, with access to unlimited broadband and no optional tiered plan or discounts.

2) The ability to opt-in and opt-out of a tiered package at any time.

3) A “meter” that tracks usage on a daily, monthly, weekly or even hourly basis, enabling customers to accurately gauge usage.

3) A 60 day/2 billing-cycle grace period to allow customers to adjust usage patterns. During this time the company will notify customers of overages but won’t charge for them.

4) Overages will cost $1 per GB, not to exceed a maximum of $25/month.

This presents the opportunity to save $5/month from a monthly broadband bill.

Time Warner already has the TV Essentials plan for $39.99/month that offers low-income households to have access to cable, in a stripped down package. Simmermon says this is meant to be the broadband equivalent.

[Stop the Cap! will publish our own views on this development in a separate editorial.]

ABC’s Daisy Whitney (New Media Minute) went in search for evidence that Americans really are fed up with their cable TV bill and are cutting the cord.  She collided head-on with an industry still in denial that consumers are fed up with high cable bills and relying on their home broadband connection for video entertainment.

Nielsen reports there are 5.1 million homes in the U.S. that have broadband-only service from their provider, and presumably rely on over-the-air TV for live televised events.  That’s up a huge 23 percent over last year.  But some analysts dismiss that as growth that comes from homes that never had broadband in the first place, a conclusion that needs more evidence to back it up.

Providers admit most of their new customers are coming from other broadband providers, especially as Americans dump slow DSL in favor of faster cable or fiber-delivered service.  In most areas, those who want broadband service already have it.  The primary exception: rural residents just accessing newly-available broadband for the first time.

For 20 years, the cable industry has enjoyed a growth in video subscribers.  That is no longer the case.  While the numbers are not staggering, hundreds of thousands of big cable customers are dropping their cable TV subscriptions every quarter, and they don’t seem to be taking their business to the competition.  Granted, many cancellations are income-related, especially among video-only customers, but it is clear a ceiling has been reached on what Americans will tolerate from the cable company.

With programming rate increases continuing unabated, that bill is only going up.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Quitting Cable TV Truth or Lie 2-22-12.m4v[/flv]

Daisy Whitney’s New Media Minute explores cord cutting.  (2 minutes)

Both sides agree Time Warner Cable needs to add a new music channel, one owned by MSG parent Cablevision Industries, to your cable lineup.

Some suspicious Buffalo hockey fans suspect the real reason for the sudden focus towards a weekend resolution of a nearly two month dispute that kept MSG off Time Warner Cable customers’ screens since Jan. 1 is the fact the New York (City) Knicks are winning some basketball games and player Jeremy Lin is enjoying his “15 minutes of fame” in the national media spotlight.  Both companies announced the latest round of negotiations, held in New York City, have brought an end to the dispute.

Now that MSG is back on Time Warner Cable, neither company is getting a round of applause for finally reaching a deal.  In fact, a key provision of the settlement requires that the cable company add a new network — Fuse — to the cable lineup.  That means Time Warner Cable customers will eventually pay for a music channel they never asked to receive.

The New York Daily News is just the latest newspaper to put fans’ frustrations into print:

[MSG and Time Warner Cable] don’t give a damn about you.

[…] Fans once apathetic over the blackout and the lethargic Knicks are now fired up and vocal. They are calling TWC and MSG. They are making their feelings known inside the Valley of the Stupid, too.

At this point they are having little impact. The two sides said they recently met. How long? Five minutes? The response from the suits at both companies is the same. Their propaganda never changes. They are more interested in gift-wrapping their problem.

Instead of locking itself in a room for around-the-clock negotiating, TWC is taking fans to a Knicks game in Charlotte. Or MSG, catering to the Asian market it suddenly discovered, is throwing a Knicks viewing party at a Chinatown restaurant. This is known as manipulation. These are nothing more than visuals. They don’t change a damn thing.

The song remains the same: TWC says MSG is looking for a 53% increase in subscriber fees, which now, according to industry analysts, average just over $2.63 per customer. MSG responds by saying TWC is lying. TWC says in September MSG agreed to a 6.5% increase. MSG says that’s a lie, too.

Someone is lying. Everyone is lying. That’s part of the spin. Instead of taking it out on both sides for shafting you, they want you to choose sides, identify a bad guy. Don’t. When two lying swines are fighting in the slop, only a sucker would try to intervene.

After nearly two months of cable subscribers complaining they were paying for a sports channel they were not getting, everyone –and– the governor got involved.  But perhaps nothing motivated a resolution more than the sudden media spotlight on Knicks’ player Jeremy Lin, dubbed Linsanity.

“Linsanity helped,” Chris Marangi, a portfolio manager at Gamco Investors told Bloomberg News.  The investment firm owns about 5 million MSG shares and 500,000 Time Warner Cable shares. “Time Warner Cable realistically couldn’t have dropped MSG — it’s too important to too many fans in New York to not be carried. Both sides probably gave a little.”

While state politicians thanked each other for a “job well done,” Time Warner Cable subscribers won’t be getting a refund for a channel missing from their lineup for eight weeks.  But they will likely face a higher rate increase in 2013, in part to pay for a music channel few knew existed and even fewer wanted.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WIVB Buffalo Fans React to MSG Deal 2-19-12.mp4[/flv]

WIVB in Buffalo explores the fallout of Time Warner Cable and MSG’s near-two-month dispute.  (2 minutes)

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Comcast has concluded the last of four public meetings to address consumer complaints with the quality of the cable company’s products and customer service in Savannah, Ga.

Dozens of customers filled Armstrong Center to complain about billing, hold times, and service issues. Comcast technicians were on hand and literally followed some customers home to address long-standing problems on the spot.

The public meetings came at the urging of Savannah city officials who have received hundreds of complaints about Comcast’s poor performance in the Georgia city. 

“We are committed to continuously improving the services that we offer and the way we deliver the service, said Andrew Macke, vice president of government and community affairs. “There’s ongoing efforts to improve that, but certainly as we value our relationship with the city, we’ll continue to work with them to highlight some of the things that we’re doing but also address some of the common themes.”  (2 minutes)