Time Warner Cable just fought a battle in the state of North Carolina to keep public tax dollars from being spent on community-owned broadband networks, but the company has no objection to accepting corporate welfare for itself.

Charlotte’s News & Observer this week reports the nation’s second largest cable company will win $3 million in state incentives if it meets hiring and investment goals. The city of Charlotte is also providing $2 million of its own incentives.  That’s $5 million dollars from the pockets of North Carolina taxpayers.

Corporate welfare

For that, Time Warner Cable is promising to add 225 jobs and build a data center to deal with anticipated broadband growth in the area.  That’s $22,222 per job.

N&O notes this is the third handout the cable company has gotten from the state government since 2004 — all in return for committed expansion in Charlotte.  The newest grant requires Time Warner to retain at least 1,113 jobs in the Charlotte area.  The state government is apparently willing to help pay for the cable company to not lay off its workers, but is all for smothering much-needed competition from community providers, which it stepped on in a big way earlier this year.

Ironically, the corporate-backed groups that loudly oppose taxpayer funding for broadband and critics of community networks are mysteriously silent over $5 million in public funds being directly transferred to a multi-billion dollar cable corporation.

If this is a new way to attract customers, it’s sure stumping marketing experts who are questioning Hawaiian Telcom’s launch of its new cable TV service to compete with Time Warner Cable’s Oceanic Cable.  Nobody knows where exactly the service is available for sale, or for how much, and HawTel officials are not saying.

“If you call Hawaiian Telcom and ask them about the service, they essentially say ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ and they are the phone company!” says Oahu resident and Stop the Cap! reader Dan Ho, who first discovered HawTel was getting into the cable business from Stop the Cap!  “I realize we’re talking about another form of U-verse here, but that could still be a good thing for Hawaiians who cannot get Oceanic Cable and are stuck with HawTel’s awful DSL service.”

HawTel’s new fiber-copper hybrid network tested successfully for 250 mystery families who participated in a secretive beta-test.  The new service is expected to be sold mostly in a packaged bundle with extra high speed DSL (presumably up to 25Mbps), a central DVR terminal that can record up to four shows off the company’s digital cable TV package concurrently, and unlimited phone service.

Lester Chu, a HawTel spokesman, wouldn’t tell reporters the prices for the new service, instead offering to accept bills from competing providers and allowing HawTel to competitively bid for your business.  The company also wouldn’t say where the service was for sale, “for competitive reasons,” added Chu.

But HawTel has been licensed to provide service on the island of Oahu, and intends to rollout the service in contiguous service areas, so once the first new customers do go public, we’ll be able to ascertain where the service is slated to be delivered next.

HawTel says they will begin targeted advertising to alert residents when the service will be available.  That traditionally means direct mailers, door hanger tags, and door-to-door visits from sales teams hired by HawTel.

“It’s a crazy way to build excitement for the product, by keeping it a secret,” Ho believes. “More important, I suspect their pricing is not going to be very good if they require customers to bring in a current bill from a cable competitor in order to get a quote.”

Ho should know, he’s a marketing professional himself.

“I suspect the company wants face time with a customer to explain away the lack of visible savings by instead talking up the features they will offer that Oceanic Cable does not,” Ho suggests.

Among those features – the four-recordings-at-a-time DVR, the 250-channel all digital lineup, and the presence of NFL Network, a network Time Warner Cable systems have perennially refused to carry on their basic digital tier because of its cost.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KITV Honolulu Hawaiian Telecom Bring Cable Competition To The Islands 7-7-11.mp4[/flv]

KITV-TV in Honolulu opened their newscast with the mysterious launch of Hawaiian Telcom’s new TV service.  (2 minutes)

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KHON Honolulu Hawaiian Telcom launches cable TV service in select location 7-7-11.mp4[/flv]

KHON-TV in Honolulu covers HawTel’s introduction of cable competition on the island of Oahu, even though company officials won’t say where it’s available or for how much.  (Loud Volume Warning!) (1 minute)

Dish Networks' ViP722: Leaving on a 60-watt bulb 24 hours a day uses just a tad more than the ludicrous power consumption of this set top box: 55W while active and 52W while in standby.

The average pay television subscriber is spending at least $4 a month in hidden electricity costs thanks to the small set top boxes found on top of many television sets across North America.  That’s more than you are paying to run a modern refrigerator.

That stunning revelation comes from a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, financed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Costs for residents in the northeastern United States, where electricity rates are often higher, can reach $10 per month for customers with a DVR in the living room and a traditional set top box in the bedroom.  That’s up to $120 a year in hidden charges.

The pay television industry, which has driven the set top box into millions of homes, has never paid much attention to energy consumption of their equipment, if only because they don’t pay the power bills of their customers.  The NRDC found that many boxes even attempt to fool consumers into believing they are running in a reduced-power mode, by programming them to slightly dim the front clock when the box’s “power button” is switched off.

In reality, most set top boxes use nearly as much power “shut off” as they use left on.

The cost of these little power demons to North America’s power grid exceeds 18 billion kilowatt hours. More than seven power plants could not sustain that level of power, even if running 24/7 every day of the year.  The combined electric use of Alberta and British Columbia in a year would still not match the power consumption of every set top box in North America.

These revelations have led the U.S. Department of Energy to lay the groundwork to regulate the power consumption of set top equipment.  Once again, the United States would be a follower.  Europe cracked down on excessive power consumption of electronic equipment years earlier.  In the United Kingdom, for example, satellite providers include a box that can achieve a standby status that only consumes a handful of watts.  The trade-off is that consumers have to wait up to 90 seconds for the box to re-boot every morning when the television is first switched on.  Consumers have the ability to choose different power states as a menu option on the devices.

Some cable operators program their DVR boxes to spin down internal hard drives overnight, assuming no recording is scheduled at those times.  But many of these initiatives were designed to spare the longevity of the hard drive, not reduce power consumption overall.

Popular Science dug through the data and uncovered the best reasonable options subscribers have for boxes that at least snort their way onto your monthly utility bill, as opposed to pigging out at the trough (your wallet):

If You Have Comcast

In terms of energy efficiency, Comcast comes out as the lesser of several evils, but not by much. Comcast’s most energy-efficient boxes tend to be slightly more efficient than their equivalents at Verizon, Time Warner, and the satellite companies, and they also offer more choices in terms of hardware. The NRDC’s data picks the Motorola DCH70 as the best standard-def box (sucking down 10W while active, and 10W while on standby), the Pace RNG110 as the best high-def box (13W active, 12W standby), and the Motorola DCX3400 as the best HD/DVR (29W active, 28W standby).

I spoke to a Comcast representative who told me that typically, the company installs whichever box they want, but that if you request a specific box that they have in stock, they’ll happily install that one for you. They won’t order you a box from elsewhere, and this kind of hardware rotates in and out of availability fairly quickly, but at least you might have the option to choose.

If You Have Verizon FiOS

Verizon’s most efficient boxes are just okay, while its least efficient are some of the worst of any surveyed. Even worse, Verizon gives the customer absolutely no option about which box they get–you can’t request a specific box at any point. That doesn’t matter too much for the non-DVR boxes, as the NRDC’s findings only turned up one standard-def and one high-def box, but there’s a big gap in efficiency between the company’s best and worst DVRs. The most efficient is Motorola’s QIP7216, at an unremarkably 29W active and 28W standby, but the older Motorola QIP6416 clocks in at a lousy 36W active and 35W standby.

If You Have Time Warner Cable

Time Warner has a smaller selection of set-top boxes than either Verizon or Comcast, with only one averagely (in)efficient DVR and one startlingly inefficient standard-def box. For a high-def, non-DVR box, the Cisco Explorer 4250HDC is the most efficient, at 19W active and 18W standby, but Time Warner told me that that’s an older box that might be tough to find. The Time Warner rep was (surprisingly, given the company’s lousy reputation here in New York) quite helpful, and offered to try to track down one of the 4250HDCs if that was what I wanted.

If You Have DirecTV

Here we get to the satellite folks. DirecTV’s offerings are only slightly less efficient than Comcast’s or Verizon’s, with the (currently only) standard-def box coming in at 12W active, 9W standby, the best HD box (the DirecTV H24) at 16W active, 15W standby, and the best HD/DVR (the DirecTV HR24) at 31W active, 31W standby. The DVR is pretty lousy, efficiency-wise, but that’s nothing compared to the Dish Network’s craziness.

If You Have Dish Network

I don’t know what is happening inside the Dish Network’s DVRs. Given the energy usage, they might well be powering nuclear reactors. The “best” DVR Dish offers, the ViP922, uses 43W while active, and 40W while in standby–but the worst one, the ViP722, uses a ridiculous 55W while active and 52W while in standby.

If You Use Internet Video Streaming

Many are ditching traditional cable services for online services like Netflix and Hulu, and luckily, there are a whole bunch of gadgets that can play that content (and more) on a TV. They are also invariably more efficient than a cable box, to a startling degree. The Apple TV (reviewed here), which streams Netflix and plays music, movies, and TV from Apple’s iTunes store, uses a mere 3W while active and 0.5W while in standby. Roku‘s XR-HD, which streams Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, and a whole bunch more, uses only 7W while active and another 7W while in standby. The Boxee Box, a curiously shaped media streamer that uses the open-source, ultra-powerful Boxee software, can play Netflix, stream video from other computers on its network, play media from a hard drive or thumb drive plugged into one of its USB ports, and stream from lots of apps (with Hulu hopefully to come soon). It was tested by an Ars Technica commenter whose measurements probably differ from the NRDC’s, but roughly estimates that it uses 13W while active and 13W while in standby.

[flv width=”640″ height=”388″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC TV boxes guzzle power 6-27-11.flv[/flv]

CBC TV took a closer look at the pay television set top box: a real power guzzler.  (2 minutes)

The performance doesn't match the promise.

Time Warner Cable took a fine free iPad app allowing authenticated cable TV customers to watch dozens of national cable networks and turned it into a complete disaster in its latest upgrade, now dubbed TWCable TV App for iPad.

Under no circumstances should you consider running this until the inexcusable bugs are worked out in a future release.

We tried this app at Stop the Cap! HQ last evening and ran into immediate problems — troubles shared by the majority of app users who took the time to bottom rate the app in Apple’s App Store.

1. On several attempts, the application claimed we were running a modified version of the Apple iPad 2’s basic software.  While “jailbreaking” iPad to improve the user experience is important for some, it has never been for us, and we are running an unmodified original firmware version of iPad 2.  But you can’t tell that to Time Warner Cable — the app will refuse to run when this error message displays.
2. When we were able to launch the application, we found the expanded channel lineup, which now includes around 100 national cable networks enticing… if we could manage to watch any of them.  Within two minutes of launching any channel, we found a frozen, unrecoverable picture.  The only way to restore viewing was to exit the channel and start again.  It left things completely unwatchable.  A few dozen channels you can watch or 100 you cannot watch?  This was not an improvement.
3. The “interactive program guide” addition allows users to see program listings for up to 7 days. Customers can also configure the guide to display only their favorite channels, in order to avoid scrolling through the entire channel line-up.  That last feature is essential — it will take you 7 days of eternal tedium to scroll through hundreds of channels looking for something to actually watch.  Cable companies need to abandon the traditional “program guide” and deliver an improved service that answers this basic question: what do YOU want to watch.  If I am in the mood for mysteries, show me what I can see.  If I want one of those cheap “true crime” documentaries, let me select from a seedy list of those shows either on now or upcoming.  It no longer matters what is showing on each channel at any time.  We want program content, not a recitation of upcoming programming on the Yarn Channel.
4. The ability to tune the set-top box from within the new guide in the app. Simply tap on a network logo within the iPad program guide or the “watch on TV” button within the program description to tune directly to the channel.  Playing around with this feature only showed one of my set top boxes — the DVR in the living room.  The one in the bedroom is apparently the bad child you want to forget.  It doesn’t show up at all.  This feature turns your iPad into a glorified remote control.  Its most useful function is to annoy your family as you change channels from another room.  Sick and tired of your significant other watching Design on a Dime when you could be watching Columbo?  Just change the channel on them.  Again and again.
5. The new app theoretically allows you to remotely manage your DVR recordings.  I say ‘theoretically’ because it worked only inconsistently.  I repeatedly found recordings I wanted to “manage” were completely unmanageable with the app, exiting with an error message.

Time Warner’s control freak mentality over jailbroken versions of iPad no doubt deals with their nightmare scenario: you might be an “unauthenticated” cable cord cutter trying to watch their networks for free, or even worse, record them for later viewing.  It took all of a few hours for iPad enthusiasts to outwit the cable company and work around this roadblock.

Perhaps it’s wrong to complain loudly about a free app like this, but with all of the negative reviews and basic functionality problems, one wonders who beta tested this thing?

Tough economic times often bring an incentive to steal cable service, especially when being given the name and number of a “connection” that can hook you up for service priced at almost $75 a month for a one-time fee of $50-75 dollars.

Time Warner Cable, among other Cleveland-area utilities, were on the hunt for one alleged under-the-table installer — Eddie Hunt — for nearly a year.

Last Wednesday, a sting paid off.

“He’s kind of known as the hook-up man. If you want to go the black market route and risk getting in trouble, he’s the man, ” Time Warner Security Director Kevin Pratt told Cleveland TV station WKYC.

Hunt is certainly qualified to install cable — he’s been allegedly fired twice from his last two jobs working for cable companies.

Hunt allegedly charged local residents a “one time” fee for unlimited cable, until security measures cut the free service off.  Time Warner claims Hunt would then be back for more money to restore the service.

Time Warner Cable surveillance video shows Hunt accepting money for an illegal cable hookup — video later partly shown by WKYC News.

Hunt was arrested by local authorities.  Time Warner Cable says it will run an amnesty program for those with illicit cable hookups, allowing them to become paying customers without legal penalties.  But the cable company says it will give only one warning before they would move to have customers prosecuted for cable theft.

Cable companies estimate at least 14 percent of their “customers” aren’t paying for cable service.  The industry claims this hurts local communities through reduced franchise fee payments and raises prices for everyone else.

“It costs you and me, the government and everybody,” said Pratt. “It’s definitely not a victimless crime.”

[flv width=”480″ height=”288″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WKYC Cleveland Garfield Heights Sting nabs alleged cable TV pirate 7-1-11.flv[/flv]

WKYC-TV ran this exclusive story on Eddie “The Hookup Man” Hunt, alleged to be responsible for cable and other utility theft in the Cleveland, Ohio area.  (3 minutes)