Just how bad is your cable company?

Apparently pretty bad, considering the number of viral videos and guerrilla campaigns being launched against the industry these days, and Time Warner Cable in particular.

“Time Warner Cable Customer Service” is a group that has already heard from Time Warner Cable’s legal team about the cable operator’s trademarks and the potential for apparent “customer confusion.” The parodists might be at risk of losing their domain name, have already had their YouTube and Twitter accounts suspended, and have been told they are not allowed to record any phone calls with Time Warner Cable employees (although the company is allowed to record them… and you.)

What has the cable operator so upset? This:

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Time Warner Cable What Can We Do Worse 4-13.flv[/flv]

Members of “Time Warner Cable Customer Service” take to the streets of Manhattan asking passersby what can the cable company do worse. Then they invade a Time Warner Cable store…. (Warning: Adult Language – NSFW) (3 minutes)

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Honest Cable Company 4-13.flv[/flv]

Another group decided a more general parody was in order. The “First Honest Cable Company” provides full disclosure about your cable service and what they really think of you. (Warning: Adult Language – NSFW) (2 minutes)

In a rebranding effort some Time Warner Cable employees and viewers are fuming about, all 17 of the cable company’s local news operations including YNN (Upstate NY), NY1 (NYC), and News 14 (the Carolinas) will be renamed “Time Warner Cable News” by the end of this year.

The new look will include a studio makeover, new theme music, and a more uniform presentation across all the news broadcasts.

The experiment in creating the cable company’s local news channel began in Rochester, N.Y. in 1990, even before Time Warner Cable as a brand existed. WGRC-TV was launched by Greater Rochester Cablevision that year with a handful of daily newscasts interspersed with off-network syndicated programming. In 1992, WGRC-TV left channel 5 for channel 9 and was rebranded “GRC9News.” When the newly named Time Warner Cable arrived in town, the channel was rebranded yet again as “R News.”

In August 2009, Time Warner changed the name to YNN (Your News Now) Rochester, just one of several YNN channels operating upstate in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany.

For YNN viewers, it is just one more name change for a news channel that has increasingly shed its veneer of independence from the cable company that lives under the same roof.

NY1 fans are far less sanguine about the change.

“It’s a boneheaded move that will punish a unique, standalone brand like NY1 — by reminding viewers just how corporate TV news has become,” wrote Don Kaplan, the New York Daily News television editor.

“This might be the stupidest media rebranding scheme I’ve ever heard of,” Seth Fletcher, a science writer who lives in Brooklyn, wrote in a Twitter post.

“Time Warner — rebranding NY1 into TWC News might be your dumbest move since merging with AOL,” wrote the band They Might Be Giants.

Time Warner said the change is intended to give the news operation a higher profile and more closely identify it as a cable-only service not available on their biggest competitors, Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-verse.

But critics of the change note most of Time Warner’s local news channels have relentlessly pounded home the channel is only available on Time Warner Cable — never on FiOS, satellite, or U-verse — for years.

At least one observer privately noted the rebranding could be another attempt to cut costs by allowing the news channels to share anchors, reporters, and news content without viewers catching on it isn’t always produced locally. YNN’s network of news channels in upstate New York have already proved this, with certain content produced in Buffalo for viewers in Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany.

Time Warner Cable is also in the process of rebranding its various local and regional sports channels under their new name: Time Warner Cable Sports.

Time Warner Cable has signed exclusive marketing deals with two apartment complexes on Staten Island that will give the cable company the sole right to pitch television, Internet, and phone services to residents. Aside from this, details like those crucial Digital Marketing Elements can also aid Time Warner Cable by increasing brand awareness, enhancing customer engagement, and driving subscriptions through targeted online campaigns.

Markham Gardens on the borough’s northern shore near Port Richmond and Park Lane at Seaview, a senior living community located in the Emerson Hill neighborhood, represent the first ever exclusive marketing deals the cable company has signed on Staten Island, and will probably not be the last.

The deal will not prevent Verizon’s FiOS fiber-to-the-home network from being available to residents in the future, but such marketing agreements can discourage residents from signing up with a competitor. Engaging with seo reseller uk enables you to offer high-quality SEO services without the overhead.

A growing number of apartment complexes in the country are signing exclusive marketing arrangements with cable operators in return for financial incentives. The agreements often bundle the cost of a renter’s cable service into the monthly rent or include it as a mandatory amenities fee. When a cable customer understands they are paying for cable service whether they want it or not, it makes it difficult for competitors to convince renters to pay for both cable service and services from the phone or satellite company.

Other types of marketing deals allow the cable operator to promote itself on an apartment complex website or through exclusive door-hangers or other marketing opportunities denied to competitors.

More than 18,000 Time Warner Cable customers in upstate New York will receive average refunds of $119 each from the cable company that overcharged them for service since 2007.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a settlement with Time Warner Cable after a two-year investigation found that the company overcharged former Cablevision subscribers in 10 Upstate towns and villages. The settlement requires Time Warner Cable to pay $2.2 million in refunds to 18,437 customers and stop charging subscribers’ fees that exceed the amounts permitted under their municipalities’ Franchise Agreements. As part of the agreement, Time Warner Cable also agreed to pay$200,000 in fees and costs to the State of New York.

The settlement requires Time Warner Cable to refund overcharges collected since March 2007, with interest, to current subscribers in the Towns of Glenville, Livonia, Stafford, Oakfield, Geneva, Thompson, Lima, Batavia and the Villages of Waterloo and Ellenville.

Former customers and those that have moved away from these communities seem to be out of luck.

Schneiderman

“For too long, Time Warner Cable has been overcharging fees to its customers in direct violation of their local franchise contracts. This agreement brings millions of dollars in refunds to upstate consumers who overpaid their bills,” said Schneiderman. “Many New York families operate on a tight budget and every dollar counts. My office will not tolerate cable companies that ignore their contractual obligations and overcharge New York subscribers.”

Time Warner Cable’s billing practices were brought to the Attorney General’s attention by the Town of Glenville in January 2011. The Attorney General began a two year investigation which found that Time Warner Cable had in fact been overcharging Glenville residents for many years, and that Time Warner Cable had been improperly charging consumers in other Upstate communities with Franchise Agreements that Time Warner Cable had acquired from Cablevision Industries in 1995. Although Time Warner Cable stopped overcharging franchise fees to consumers and voluntarily made $1.4 million in refunds to subscribers in eight towns in 2007 and 2010, it continued to overcharge consumers in the ten towns and villages covered by this agreement.

A Franchise Agreement is a contract that local governments negotiate with cable companies granting the right to offer services and use public facilities. Some of the Franchise Agreements at issue limited the fee Time Warner Cable paid the town to 3% of gross revenues, and prohibited the cable company from billing subscribers any part of this cost. Other Franchise Agreements required Time Warner Cable to pay a 5% franchise fee and permitted Time Warner Cable to pass-through two-fifths of this fee to subscribers.  The municipalities also had the option to voluntarily allocate two-fifths of the fee to a fund subsidizing the cost of expanding the cable network in their communities, in which case none of the fee was permitted to be passed-through to consumers. The Attorney General’s investigation found that Time Warner Cable violated both types of Franchise Fee restrictions.

As a result of the settlement, Time Warner customers will receive credits on their bill within 90 days, with the amount proportional to their monthly subscription charges. Individual overcharges vary by customer and town, but average $119 with accumulated interest. As part of the Attorney General’s investigation, Time Warner Cable reviewed its records of all its New York Franchise Agreements purchased from Cablevision and identified no other towns where similar overcharges had taken place during the period from 2007 to 2013.

Time Warner Cable objects to publicly-owned broadband networks because they represent “unfair” publicly-funded “competition,” despite the fact TWC is also on the public dole.

The next time a cable operator or phone company claims community-owned broadband providers deliver unfair competition because they are government-funded, remind them that quite often that phone or cable company also happens to be on the public dole.

Take Time Warner Cable, which this week won a $5,266,979 grant courtesy of New York State taxpayers to extend their cable system to 4,114 homes in rural parts of upstate New York just outside of the cable company’s current service areas. That equals $1,280.26 in state tax dollars per household. For that public investment, Time Warner will reap private profits for shareholders from selling broadband, cable-TV, phone, and home security services to its newest customers indefinitely.

Now unlike some of my conservative friends, I am not opposed to the state spending money to wire rural New York. It is obvious cable and phone companies will simply never wire these areas on their own so long as Return on Investment conditions fail in these places. What does annoy me are the endless arguments we hear in opposition to public broadband from these same companies, claiming with a straight face that community-owned networks represent “unfair competition” because they are publicly funded. Time Warner Cable is no stranger to public taxpayer benefits itself, having won millions in tax abatements and credits in North Carolina, Ohio and a cool $5 million courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. N.Y. Taxpayer.

Many of the nation’s private telecommunications companies have plenty of love for federal, state, and local officials who have passed favorable tax laws and policies at their behest:

• AT&T not only did not pay any federal taxes in 2011, it actually secured a $420 million taxpayer-subsidized refund;
• Local governments have granted rights-of-way red tape cutting, tax credits and abatements in return for siting important facilities in select areas and hiring an appropriate number of employees to work in them;
• State laws that have made life easy for telecom companies, including statewide video franchising;
• State laws that make life difficult for their would-be competitors, especially public broadband networks.

So let us end the silly rhetoric about public vs. private broadband being a question of fairness. This is really a question about who controls your broadband future,  your community or big telecom corporations.

In states like Georgia, elected politicians like Rep. Mark Hamilton want those decisions made by Comcast (Pennsylvania), Windstream (Arkansas) and AT&T (Texas). His bill would make it next to impossible for a local community to do anything but beg and plead the phone company to deliver something, anything that resembles broadband service. For a good part of rural Georgia (and elsewhere), the answer has always been a resounding “no,” at least until the federal government steps up and kicks in your money to help defray the costs of extending Windstream or AT&T’s sub par DSL service that slows to a crawl once the kids are out of school.

Windstream waited for the federal government to kick in $7.28 million in taxpayer dollars before it would agree to extend its DSL service to rural customers in its own home state of Arkansas.

You have to wonder about the Republicans in Georgia these days who used to fight for local and state control over almost everything. It should be instinctive for any conservative to want out-of-state pointyheads out of their business, but Rep. Mark Hamilton, himself a business owner, seems content forfeiting those rights to companies headquartered hundreds of miles away. If it was the federal government telling Georgia what kind of broadband service it deserves, do you think Mr. Hamilton would be so amenable? Unfortunately, should Hamilton have his way, for the foreseeable future, residents and business owners in Gray, Sparta, or Eatonton to count just a few will have broadband just the way the state’s phone companies want it — super slow DSL, dial-up or satellite fraudband.