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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."
I really hope this goes a bad way for cable companies. They have had a tight lock on cable boxes for too long, we have been stuck with the crappy quality cable boxes from motorola and SA for too long.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
We should join the venture and do this with Verizon FIOS.
I'm paying out almost $30 a month extra for 2 set top boxes and a DVR because they're required. We can't even watch the 10 "normal" channels anymore on a STB free tv. I have 2 more TV's i'd love to hook up but dont want to spend an extra $10 per STB per month.
David needs to take down Goliath again.
It sounds good, but in the end, this will go nowhere. It's cable, you don't have to have it, and therefore he is choosing to pay $15 a month. Besides if the cable card option is available, does it really matter if it is hidden on their site, he can already buy another box. He should have waited until Feb '09, then he can get all of the grandma's with 25 year old TVs onboard.
...are the vast numbers of people over the whole of this world of ours who *pay* for TV services that *also* have advertising included.
Here in the UK, you don't get much of a choice to not pay the TV License fee but at least everything the BBC broadcasts is advert free. And likewise, I will happily sit & watch the free cable/satellite channels that have advertising breaks.
But I definitely *WON'T* pay to be advertised at.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Would a consumer-positive result (IE: Time Warner loses) also have any kind of side-effect on the issues surrounding the cable "Broadcast Flag" controversy and digital T.V. cards for PC's? Admittedly, I stopped following that entire scene a year or two ago when the flag came to life, so it may have already been resolved, but it does make one wonder what far-reaching effects a positive ruling in a case like this might have.
To quote the great philosopher, Fezzik: "I hope we win."
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Way back in the mists of time, the UK telecoms market was a government-granted monopoly - initially granted to the Post Office, later spun out into a separate company.
Go back far enough, and anyone who wanted a telephone was obliged not only to rent the line but also the telephone itself (which was listed on the bill as a separate item that you rented). Someone did take the telco to court over this and won - and today there are any number of telephones on the market you can plug in.
Furthermore, the cable company (another monopoly...) always goes to great pains to stress that the cable box (and/or cable modem) is free, you're just paying for the line it connects to. I don't doubt that these two are related.
If they lost their box rental monopoly, they'd simply boost service rates to make up the difference. It would seem the cable companies want to eliminate boxes, anyway. Last week Cablevision won their long battle with the networks over the right to offer DVR functionality from centralized servers. Their motivation: cutting their biggest capital expense...those boxes might work terribly sometimes, but they're not cheap, and charging $7 a month to rent one means they don't recoup the cost of one for over a year.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
Naughty. You used the word "Vista" and "solution" in the same sentence without a negative. This is Slashdot, what were you thinking?
Anyways:
Enjoy your 3 months of free DVR rental as part of your settlement offer
The point here is not to make a quick buck in a settlement. It's to get the cable company to unbundle thier service from thier hardware. If the company won't give you access to thier premium services without renting thier cable box, your alternatives don't help.
If this pans out than MythTV will finally be a viable solution. MythTV is a great system and works splendidly as a DVR and it has its own browser and you can do pretty much anything linux can do from your remote and they are cheap because they use standard parts. So you could probably build your own set top box for 300 dollars. Moreover if these set top boxes were mass produced than they could be really cheap. Even though they probably wouldn't have too many bells and whistles but they would be cheap and you wouldn't be forced to pay a monthly fee for a POS device.
Either way all this bundling is killing us. Whether its cell phones or cable boxes they are sapping all our money.
They'll just raise the monthly rate to compensate if they can't charge a rental fee for the box.
They'll just raise the monthly rate
Fixed that for you.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So while despite the prevalence of open standards in the cable industry (hello DOCSIS and QAM) and their wide support among the manufacturers of cable hardware, that it's okay for them to give me no choice but to rent hardware they approve of? That's like saying that AT&T's forced rental of phones in the past was a perfectly valid business practice. But then again, I suppose "It's telephone service, you don't have to have it."
It's *not* alright for the company to charge me to rent the hardware, and then to charge an "Access fee" that corresponds with the technology the hardware utilizes. On my bill, I pay a rental fee for my HD box, a rental fee for my SD box, and then I pay for the channels I subscribe to. But wait, since I'm an ignorant consumer and don't understand that digital capability allows you to deliver a greater number of differentiated services over the same network and with less hardware (which lowers the cable company's costs), they're going to charge me not only for those channels I subscribe to, but again based on the "class" of the service I'm getting. So I pay a "DVR" fee. And a "Digital Access" fee. And more totally and utterly made up bullshit.
Indeed. I think every modern service should remind me of the old saying, "Ma Bell's got you by the calls."
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
So you're paying almost $50 a year for two cards that costs cents each to produce. They've done exactly the same thing by forcing you to rent cards rather than cable boxes.
What exactly is the monthly fee supposed to be covering? It may even be that their margin on cable box rentals isn't much different than that on card rentals.
Once, the card is issued all it is is a number in a database to them. This is like a hotel charging you per night for the room key.
Why on earth aren't they charging you a couple of dollars for the card and then being done with the charging? Perhaps you should join the suit or start your own?
Because they it makes it harder for them to claim they still own the card.
Subscription pricing makes it clear it isn't yours.
Speaking as someone who works for the cable industry, this is a dollar short and a day late. The cable industry has already taken steps to increase competition in the cable box marketplace. http://www.opencable.com/ The Opencable platform is going to be the next generation of the cablecard technology (which already suits his needs btw). Cablecard was created to allow cable subscribers access to the digital channels on their own devices. Basically cablecard is a hardware secuirty token that allows access to the cable network. Opencable takes this a step further by defining the schema for interactive, two way services. This means that not only will you be able to access the cable channels (like cablecard) you will soon be able to access VOD and other "interactive" services from any device that supports this open standard. This is just another frivilous lawsuit brought about by somebody who is totally ignorant of what they are suing over. I hope this guy spends thousands of dollars only to find this out. Next time he should turn to Google before he turns to his lawyer.
Yup. The big beef is that the manufacturer serial number is a rendom length value too. Plus the billing system was only designed to accept either moto or SA valid serial numbers. So it has to be re-educated to take a device ID(cablecard) and a host ID (the random number of digits and type of characters manufacturer's serial number) for billing instead of just a fixed length serial number.
Using the account number is a bad idea. Especially when some boxes are provisioned to NOT get HD or HD on demand, or porn, etc. Each box is linked to a "socket" on the account. A socket can contain any addressable item. Like a DOCSIS modem, a STB, or an eMTA device. Fuck, even an addressable tap in some places (no truck rolls to change analog service status/level).
Sponge!
Also, I can say truthfully that comcast's billing system is HAPPY to run on a VT100 terminal... They just make a snazzy front-end to it for the "normal" reps to use. Only supervisors and above can go in and "manually" change things.
Sponge!
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.
The other thing, that everyone needs to realize, is that that $7 a month is called a box rental fee, but that's also to cover support costs for that box. When a customer has a problem with the box itself, are they calling Scientific Atlanta, or Time Warner Cable? They call Time Warner Cable.
So fine, get your own box, but then, just like the phone company, if a customer is having technical issues with that cable box that is unrelated to Time Warner's cable signal, then that customer calls the manufacturer of the cable box.
I'm sure he watches broadcast TV for that, like Americans have been doing for decades.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Full disclosure: I work for a small cable operator.
Ok, what if he wins. TW still has to pay for the costs of those boxes. The ones we use cost up to $400 from SA if they have a DVR. Instead of spreading the cost fairly among all subscribers, everyone's price goes up.
The guy can try to sue for openness, but that's exactly what the FCC has tried to push with the CableCard system. It hasn't worked. The free market isn't there because it's not a sustainable business model.
In the year we've been on digital, we've had one person ask about using a CableCard because his TV was supposed to support it. He finally found out that his TV was built on a draft version, and wouldn't work without a hardware upgrade.
Anyone here ever performed an upgrade on their TV?
If TW was violating the FCC rules, I could see this guy having a case, but he can't even find hardware that will support the CableCard lock/key system operators employee to secure their system.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but many local teams have moved their games to pay services. Some of these channels (like the New England Sports Network) are advertiser-supported and carried on cable programming tiers, while a few are still a pay-per-channel service similar to HBO.
In the case of the Boston Red Sox, probably some 140 or more of their 162 games are on NESN. The national outlets, Fox and ESPN, carry the occasional game (usually Red Sox vs. Yankees), but certainly not enough to satisfy the desires of most fans who want complete season coverage.
In the Boston market, neither the Red Sox nor the Celtics are available on local television. The Patriots (football) are on the local CBS and FOX affiliates, but that's because the NFL has a league-wide deal with its broadcast outlets. When the Red Sox were sold to their new owners a couple of years back, one of the most important parts of the package was NESN. At the time it was valued at about $750 million, or about a quarter of the entire price of $3 billion. After ending the World Series drought in 2004, NESN's value increased substantially. Since there are only a fixed number of seats in Fenway Park, much of the potential for revenue growth potential lies in services like NESN and expansion to international markets like Japan.
There are two sides to this coin though.
Yes, TiVo's are awesome. Unless they break, then you have to fix it. 'Fix' sometimes = Buy a new one.
Time Warners box costs $6.95 or whatever a month. It'd take you 43 months to pay $299 that say a TiVo costs (ok not all do, but I'm doing the HD dual tuner model)
When has one TiVo stayed on the market for 43 months without a new model with new features?
At time warner, I get a new one if a new functionality/feature comes out, and if it breaks, I get a new one no questions asked (barring 'why does this look like it was beat with a hammer' kind of thing)
oh, did TiVo stop charging monthly too? I quit using one about two years ago. yes you can buy the one time thing I think, but again that's a good chunk of money.
Having had a TiVo Break, or a new version come out within 43 months of purchase, I can say that to me the time warner deal isn't that bad.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Tivos do not necessarily have a monthly cost for listings. Lifetime service (tied to the box) has returned for all. You have to decide whether the 'gamble' is worth it to you, but generally the thing to go wrong on a Tivo is the hard drive. (Even if it is not, you can usually pay a certain fee to Tivo to get a new box and have the lifetime transferred. That refers to the case of a broken Tivo. What you can't do is just go buy a new Tivo and expect to transfer the lifetime service -- with rare exceptions like the 'grandfathered' exception for lifetime subscriptions from before mid-2000, and a few reduced-cost lifetime transfer options that have happened in the past..)
I realize that's longwinded... but I'm a huge fan of Tivo, but would not pay monthly at the current rate. I 'gamble' that the lifetime will be worth it, and it certainly was for my S1s.. My S3 & TivoHD have now been going for a while now..