Time Warner Cable has announced that it plans to drop Ovation, the only arts-related station offered by the cable service provider. This move is due to low viewer numbers that put Ovation near the bottom of Time Warner's offerings. As a result of the low numbers, TWC has paid out more in fees than the station is bringing in, with the cable provider having paid the station in excess of $10 million over the years.
If there's one (of many things) customers don't like seeing on their monthly statement, it's a frivolous charge. It's not surprising that when Time Warner started sending out notifications alerting customers to a monthly $3.95 modem rental fee, the results were less than enthusiastic. Now the company is being hit with a class action lawsuit in New York and New Jersey.
A few months ago, Google introduced its own unique fiber optic TV and internet service by launching it exclusively in Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS. However, the company didn't just pick the two cities at random. Google was given a number of incentives by both cities, and now AT&T and Time Warner are coming forward and demanding that they receive the same incentives as well in the Kansas City area.
The executives at Verizon are likely jumping for joy today, as the FCC has approved the company's planned spectrum acquisition. Verizon will be purchasing spectrum licenses from SprectrumCo, which is a joint venture between a number of big cable companies, including Comcast and Time Warner. It's paying a lot of money for access to that AWS spectrum as well, as the total price comes in at a whopping $3.9 billion.
Whenever we talk about tiered data plans, broadband caps, and the death of unlimited service, the standard tone to take is to look at high data users as victims. But there is an entirely other side to the coin, which is users who don't access a whole lot of data and are paying way more than their consumption should dictate.
Time Warner Cable and Viacom have been embroiled in a lawsuit for a long time now that stemmed from Time Warner wanting to put Viacom channels on its iPad app for streaming. Viacom maintained that Time Warner only had permission to air its channels on cable TV. Viacom fought tooth and nail and is now finally settling the differences with Time Warner.
Google has filed a new patent infringement suit against Motorola and Time Warner Cable. TiVo is alleging the two companies are infringing on three patents that it holds having to do with DVR systems. The suit was filed in federal court in Texas and is a bit of retaliation over previous suit Motorola had filed against TiVo for patent infringement.
In a move that simply had to start happening sooner or later, the folks at Time Warner Cable have announced that they'll be streaming content to Android devices starting at the end of March 2012. This service was announced in a very low-key Twitter update by Time Warner Cable's own Director of Digital Communication in New York City, Jeff Simmermon. The move to Android for streaming content will come via the most updated version of the Google mobile operating system software Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Verizon Wireless has splashed out on $3.6bn worth of spectrum for its LTE expansion, grabbing 122 AWS licenses covering approximately 259m people from a joint venture made up of Comcast Corporation, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks. The deal, the carrier has announced, will also include several produce and service agreements, allowing each company to sell the other's products and, eventually, each of the cable companies being able to offer Verizon Wireless service wholesale, likely rebranding it as their own wireless offerings.
Streaming video has a huge potential for the movie studios and TV studios that make the content that many of us like to watch. Some of the studios have big plans for streaming video services even and one of the larger studios, Warner Bros, has now unveiled a new streaming video platform that sounds interesting called Flixster Collections. The CEO of Time Warner Jeff Bewkes talked about the service this week during an earnings conference call.
During an earnings call today, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, let on that the company has plans to expand its HBO Go app beyond mobile devices. The app was officially launched back in April for both the iOS and Android platforms and has since been fairly popular, having reached 4 million total downloads.
Movie streaming must be hot right now. Not only has the current king in DVD rentals and movie streaming, Netflix, revealed their interesting in shifting completely towards streaming, but numerous new challengers have stepped into the ring with the latest movie-streaming contender possibly being a Warner Bros. and Flixster combo.
