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Time Warner Cable Box Rental Inspired Antitrust Lawsuit
EmagGeek writes "Matthey Meeds, a real-estate agent, was so irritated about having to pay the monthly rental fee that on Tuesday he filed an antitrust suit against Time Warner Cable and its 84 percent owner, Time Warner Inc. The suit alleges that, by linking the provision of premium cable services to rental of the cable box, the companies have established illegal tying arrangements. 'Time Warner's improper tying and bundling harms competition,' Meeds' lawsuit states. 'Since the class can only rent the cable box directly from Time Warner, manufacturers of cable boxes are foreclosed from renting and/or selling cable boxes directly to members of the class at a lower cost.' I pay Comcast over $25/mo for my two DVRs. I'd love to just be able to buy them or build my own. I can't wait to see how this unfolds."
Tivo and Vista Media Center both offer cablecard solutions. These bypass the need for cable boxes for most users. And before you start, there are solutions for switched video coming as well.
This will all be supplanted by VOD over the Interweb.
Bringing the lawyers in is really weak. Enjoy your 3 months of free DVR rental as part of your settlement offer.
I hope for the best in this situation. It would be nice to have a system where you can build your own PVR, because, I have SageTV on my computer, and it's vastly better than and PVR box I have ever seen. It only works with the first 70 channels that are sent over plain old analog cable, but that includes most of the stuff I watch anyway. Most of the stuff on the digital only channels is movie/sports channels that I don't pay for, or time shifted (other time zone) stuff that I don't need anyway since I use SageTV. I still pay for the rental of a box, but it's only $4 a month, as it's just a receiver, and not a PVR. Things could be better, and I hope they get better in the future, but as long as I have my analog cable, I'm happy with things the way they are.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
For a while Verizon Fios was giving out free Digital adapter boxes if you went to a service station and asked (no purchase or rental). They're really cheap-quality boxes, about the size of a CD wallet and don't have a TV Guide or VoD server. They just allow for manual entry of channels via a remote (which is what most people really need anyway).
But they can watch all non-HD channels that you subscribe to, all the way up through the 1000's.
I think they charge for them now as a purchase (not a rental). So you might want to ask about it.
Exactly wrong. Premium cable channels were originally commercial free in the U.S. That was one of the reasons early cable was a "big deal." One watched movies on HBO for example, not commercials. AMC is another good example. No commercials ever. Almost all cable channels in the late 70s / early 80s had limited or no commercials. Then the commercial creep set in. Commercials between the movies. OK. Commercials during the movie, lots of them. And in the intervening time cable rates have gone up at rates that far exceed inflation. We're paying more for cable and getting way more commercials. It's crap. And before someone says that channels like AMC now offer original programming, let me remind you that they introduced commercials long before they produced original programming.
As a matter of fact, you are completely wrong about property rights. One cannot do anything they want with their property, they must act within the confines of the law. For example, in my locality, I cannot erect any structure taller than 30 feet on my land.
From what I've seen of the comments on this article, people are confused about the nature of Time Warner's services. Time Warner does not give a simple DVR, in fact, the machine they give you is not technically a DVR at all, from what I can tell. Time Warner provides a thin client network, with customer "on demand" requests processed on their systems. As far as I can tell, if the cable box has any on board storage, it only stores the ID of a program and the position where the user left off. I could be wrong, but I couldn't locate any sort of hard drive in that cable box, and I doubt that it could have enough flash storage for the number of shows people "record."
As for competition...until very recently, the only legitimate competition Time Warner had was satellite, and it was clean that cable was winning that battle, at least in urban areas. Since Time Warner is basically the only cable provider in most of New York City, and since they only provide ONE set top box, this lawsuit may have some credence. I personally doubt it, since the cable box is really just an access mechanism to Time Warner's services, and there is nothing stopping someone from picking up a DVR and connecting it to that cable box (much like one would do with a VCR). Or maybe there is yet another angle to this lawsuit.
Palm trees and 8
There are technical reasons for the cable company to use different frequencies than those used for OTA broadcast. It allows the full use of the bandwidth provided by the distribution system. It also avoids the interference problems that happen when a broadcast station and a cable system use the same frequency.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Umm, I'm pretty sure we aren't on the gold standard any longer so what relevance does the price of gold have to do with anything? Somehow I think if we had 300% inflation in the last nine years that it would be a story..... according to this $20 in 1998 was worth $25.75 in 2007.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Paid $300 up front for my DVR, then the setup fee, then the activation fee, then I still have to pay a fee each month for the rental of the box (their excuse is that its a $700 box and I got it at a discount), then I have to pay for the DVR service. Then I paid the $40 one time fee to activate the USB port so that I could use MY external HD, which they cut access to if I am just one day late on my bill.