Time Warner: Sorry, dude, we had to take away your channels

To his credit, Time Warner Cable's Damon Porter spokesmanned up. He didn't sugar-coat the news. As much as I might gripe about having 44 channels taken off my TiVo — and having no access to the dozen new HD channels that went online in KC overnight — Porter told me there would be no relief for months, and exactly why.

As I told you on Tuesday, Time Warner is effectively shutting off its customers who use CableCARDs from future channel upgrades and taking away some of their existing ones. That's because TWC is moving to a switched digital video or SDV platform, and it requires compatible CableCARDs ... which it currently doesn't have.

CableCARDs have been a major PR issue for the cable industry, as it presents a classic confrontation between consumers' desire for choice and a media giant's intuition to control. Welcome to my world! Anyway, I was really hacked that TWC's customer rep had sold me so effusively on CableCARDs — I was proactive enough to call before making a decision to buy a Series 3 HD TiVo — and now, mere months later, I find myself paying for crippled technology.

So here's what Damon Porter told me today.

"We're totally out of bandwidth," he said, "and the only way we can reclaim more bandwidth is to go to switched digital. "The overwhelming number of our customers want more HD programming, so to stay in the game when all our competitors are adding more HD programmning, we've got to do that." Thanks to the move to SDV, Time Warner can offer the following channels beginning now:

* TBS HD – Channel 1014
* TLC HD – Channel 1040
* Science Channel – Channel 1023
* CNN HD – Channel 1044
* Travel Channel HD – Channel 1050
* Versus/Golf HD – Channel 1055
* Animal Planet HD – Channel 1057
* Fox News HD – Channel 1060
* Outdoor Channel – Channel 1202
* ESPN News HD – Channel 1204
* Biography HD – Channel 1217
* Planet Green HD – Channel 1226

Well, that is true, I have nagged TWC about being behind in the number of HD offerings it's had on its system. Unfortunately, this doesn't help me, because I checked and I get none of these on my TiVo.

"We only have 1200 CableCARDS out in the field," Porter informed me. That's out of about 275,000 homes served in Kansas City. "It's a very small number of people affected, and there is an option for them [me], which is go back to the old set-top boxes."

I'll think about that. Personally, I prefer to go forwards instead of backwards, but I appreciate Porter's candor and I will hold Time Warner to their promise to have the new CableCARDS out to the 1200 of us who need them by "early Q4," which sounds like mid-October to me.