Time Warner price change to punish gamers, Apple heads, movie lovers and more
By Leslie Poston
Have you finally talked your parents into getting online so they can watch movies now that Apple has unleashed its new AppleTV subscription service and Netflix offers a way to download movie rentals online? Do you find yourself downloading vast amounts of music to satisfy your music cravings from iTunes? Do you use Amazon’s new Unboxed service? Are you a gamer that plays Halo on your Xbox or did you just buy a Nintendo Wii and start downloading games and Miis? Time Warner Cable has thought of a way to punish all of you.
It was bad enough when Comcast decided to ban BitTorrent. Sure people use BitTorrent for illegal downloads and porn, but they also use it for legitimate file transfers, and the move punished legitimate business users who thought the 3MB email file restrictions on ComCast weren’t giving them the space they needed to share files. A court stepped in to force Comcast to allow BitTorrent access again, and I’m hoping a court will do the same for Time Warner Cable’s greedy new price structure.
What is happening is that Time Warner Cable has created a new, download-based price structure. Soon to be gone for Time Warner Cable customers are the unlimited downloads and limited uploads every internet user enjoys now. They want to charge you on a tiered price structure based on how much and how often you download form the internet. Coming on the heels of innovations in online media use like Apple’s subscription service for its AppleTV, Amazon’s Unboxed and the raging popularity of games that you can play live or download avatars and Miis for, this is a slap in the face of Time’s core customer base.
Even if you don’t think you use bandwidth, as one fellow internet writer points out everything from watching videos on YouTube to catching up with free television shows and other content on your favorite sites without actually downloading anything uses bandwidth. Even uploading photos to sites like Flickr, Geni, and Photobucket uses bandwidth. Say goodbye to sharing those vacation photos with your family and friends - chances are you won’t be able to afford it.
It is my opinion that this idea came down from Time Warner Cable’s entertainment division. With Warner Bros losing such a huge chunk of the pie in movie and music downloads and unable to keep pace with the changing face of entertainment, they seem to have decided to gouge their customers another way - through their internet access arm. It’s an interesting approach - punishing the people who want your product, just in a different format than you currently offer it (digital). Punishing the people who want to download music, television shows and movies through the RIAA, even those who wanted to pay for them and then use them as they see fit, wasn’t working. So Time Warner Cable has come up with a plan of draconian proportions: hit the customer where it hurts.
When I first hurt of this diabolical scheme, I thought “it won’t affect me, not really.” But then I thought of my husband, a massive World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights junkie, and of me and my love of music and watching television on my laptop and all of the downloads I buy from iTunes and eMusic. Then I thought of my mom - she isn’t an internet junkie, but she often downloads television shows to watch on her laptop as well. Then, the more I thought I about the ways content has become commonplace in digital format, the more I realized how much this could hurt the average computer user - not just the rabid gamers and BitTorrent junkies out there.
Where and when is this bomb first going to drop? Beaumont, Texas are the first unlucky winners of this pricing Ponzi scheme. When asked when, Time Warner Cable will only commit to “later this year”. That gives the internet a few months to lobby congress and the courts to stop this nonsense. I for one plan to write the EFF, MoveOn and the folks at Save The Internet and see if they can put their massive machines behind this cause. Greed has been killing the music industry for a decade, and creeping into the movie industry to slow it down as well, and now it is going after the internet user. Time Warner Inc, owner of Time Warner Cable and Warner Bros - the new bad guy on the online block.
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January 17th, 2008
If I use more water or electricity than my neighbors, I’m not going to be shocked to find out that I’m paying more than them for those services.
Why should my mother who is online for about 10 minutes a day to futz with her email, have to pay the same price as people eating up a lot more of the capacity?
January 18th, 2008
I’m guessing your mother probably uses a connection other than the cable in question if she only checks her email for 10 minutes a day.
January 18th, 2008
She uses AT&T DSL. But why does that matter to this discussion?
January 18th, 2008
how did you find this out?
January 19th, 2008
“She uses AT&T DSL. But why does that matter to this discussion?”
Time Warner is a cable internet company. DSL is run by another company, so is not being affected by the Time Warner rate hike.
“how did you find this out?”
It was all over the online news the past few days, in press releases, on the major tech news sites, and in my news feeds.
January 21st, 2008
also, if you had ANY doubt this was money motivated, visit this link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080121/wr_nm/timewarner_hbobroadband_dc
June 4th, 2008
I’m a Time Warner Roadrunner and cable TV subscriber.
If this plan is implemented in my area (NE Ohio),
I will drop them and move to a different isp and use DSL or even dial-up before they see one penny from me.
I’ll get satellite TV as well.
I’m even wondering if a class action lawsuit would be a viable response seeing how the contract I signed was for “unlimited” broadband usage.
In the meantime watch out for a guy who’s initials are… Mark Evans…
I think he’s a Time Warner plant. He’s all over the internet and in various forums trying to defend this insanity.