Time Warner Cable looking to reclaim edge

  Now that we know Time Warner Cable is staying Time Warner Cable, what's in it for the 300,000 customers of Kansas City's dominant cable provider?

  After years of technological advances and new gizmos for its subscribers, Time Warner Cable has lately suffered from a failure to innovate. There's a reason for that. For two years the company has been in limbo while the media giants that owned it, Time Warner and Comcast Corp., sorted out a mess of business deals across the country. That included the future of Kansas City Cable Partners, the 50-50 joint venture operating under the Time Warner brand (before that, it was known as American Cablevision).

  Late this summer word finally came that Comcast would sell its half of the partnership to Time Warner. Since Time Warner managers were running the system anyway, things could have stayed just as they were.

  But Roger Ponder knew better. Ponder, the general manager of Time Warner Kansas City, was keenly aware that with the long corporate drama finally over, it was time to start delivering the goods again to his customers.

  “Kansas City, in all of the Time Warner (markets), has always been an innovator,” Ponder said in a recent interview. “It was first to offer video-on-demand. One of the first to launch digital phone (service). High speed data -- one of the first three markets. But I think in the last couple of years, maybe the potential of change slowed us a little bit from doing even more things.”

  In the coming months, expect Time Warner to add value to existing services and roll out new ones.

  Already Time Warner has made an HBO or Showtime subscription more valuable by throwing in its Premium On Demand service at no charge. (Comcast had been doing that all along for the customers it serves in Olathe and eastern Jackson County.) So, for example, every HBO subscriber can catch “The Wire” six days prior to broadcast on the HBO On Demand channel without paying $5.95 a month for the privilege.

  And after more than a year without any new high-definition channels, Time Warner added Universal HD, which draws from the vast film and video collection of NBC Universal. Early offerings included Andre Agassi's tennis swan song at the U.S. Open and “Battlestar Galactica,” two cable broadcasts never before seen in high definition.

  But Time Warner should have even more HD channels, as Ponder acknowledges. In this instance, being bigger may not be better. Two locally-owned cable systems -- suburban Everest and Sunflower Cablevision in Lawrence -- have been quick to add high-definition channels from such networks as National Geographic, Starz, ESPN2, HGTV, MTV and the National Football League. Time Warner's corporate office in Connecticut is still negotiating to carry these channels.

  Actually, “negotiation” is too polite a term to describe the PR war Time Warner is waging with the NFL. The league wants Time Warner to put the channel on basic cable and pay a hefty fee for NFL Network, even though it will only air eight regular-season games this year. Time Warner wants to put the network on a premium tier for only those who want it and are willing to pay extra. Each says the other side is being totally unreasonable.

  Time Warner is sponsoring a Web site, NFLGetReal.com, and circulating a booklet of press clippings with headlines like, “The Story of NFL Greed and Apathy Toward Fans and Partners.” The NFL retorts that "no other cable system in the country carries us on a sports tier. We see that as a way of trying to extort NFL fans because they're passionate." Suffice it to say, this feud may go on a bit longer.

  But Damon Shelby Porter, the local director of public affairs for Time Warner, says that regardless of its situation with the league, all local viewers will get to see the Chiefs' Thanksgiving Day game, which is one of those eight NFL Network games. It will be simulcast on a local station.

  Ponder put a lot of emphasis on “our people” in his interview, and in some less obvious ways, Time Warner is trying to be more community-minded. Customer-service calls now stay inside the building instead of being farmed out to call centers. Time Warner has teamed with CommonSenseMedia.org to offer age-specific ratings and reviews for hundreds of TV shows for kids and their parents. And it recently added “Newsmakers,” a local interview program created by Comcast for its subscribers. The five-minute segment features politicians and personalities chatting with KMBZ's Mike Shanin. It airs during end-of-the-hour breaks on CNN Headline News (Channel 43 on Time Warner).

  Speaking of Comcast, it still serves more than 100,000 homes in the area, and has caught up to Time Warner in digital offerings. Then there's Everest, which continues to nip away at Time Warner's customer base. (See stories below.) And there's satellite, specifically DirecTV, which is getting a huge infusion of cash from its new owner Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox.

  But Ponder, who spent 22 years at Sprint before joining Time Warner Cable, expects his people to reclaim the cable edge in Kansas City.

  “You're going to see us as the innovator in the future as we were in the past,” he said.

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Everest: Plugging away

Little-bitty Everest Connections was sold in July to a private equity firm in July; that same month, the Lenexa-based cable-phone-Internet provider hooked up its 30,000th home in the Kansas City area. Everest's customers like what they get in their all-in-one bundles. A whopping 95 percent of them use digital cable boxes, 82 percent have high-speed Internet and more than half take HBO, all well above industry averages, according to Everest's David Ballew. And those packages, which start at $80 a month with digital cable, Internet and regular phone service, have allowed Everest to capture half or more of the cable customers in communities it serves. And rather than pick a fight with the NFL Network, Everest simply opted out of carrying the eight regular-season games. It's getting everything else from NFL Network, including HD and on-demand offerings, at nominal cost. Everest is technologically savvy, with features like Caller ID on TV and a new interactive service that makes Web content, from eBay auctions to school lunch menus, available at the press of a remote button. But if you don't live in Lenexa, Shawnee, Overland Park, Brookside-Waldo or Red Bridge, don't hold your breath: Everest won't be in your neighborhood anytime soon. It's expanding, but slowly.--A.B.

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Comcast: It has the edge … for now

This summer Comcast, which serves 100,000 homes in Kansas and Missouri, finally caught up to Time Warner Cable in services offered when it launched digital phone service. That was in addition to video-on-demand, which Comcast added in May. Both services have been offered to Time Warner customers for years. Today, though, Comcast customers might be getting slightly more for their money than their friends who live in Time Warner territory. Comcast's high-definition lineup includes channels Time Warner's doesn't. And Comcast launched a video-on-demand system this summer that I found more intuitive to use than Time Warner's. It's based on a menuing system, much like a web site, while Time Warner's VOD requires navigating both the channel grid and a poorly designed slide menu. Plus, Comcast's VOD is searchable across thousands of titles. (Time Warner says it is working on a new VOD menuing system.) There is still room for improvement. Some HD channels aren't offered by Comcast that Everest carries, and Everest still has the technology edge. And why might that be important? Because Everest gets more requests to come to Olathe than from any other community. Olathe is Comcast country … for now.--A.B.