An Open letter to Time Warner Cable

Dear Time Warner Cable,

As I am sure that you are already aware, you recently bought out my area’s cable service with Comcast. You stayed true to your communications with me via regular mail and advertisements online and in the beginning the only difference I saw between my “old” and “new” service was the name on the bill. Unfortunately it didn’t stay that way.

First it began with just little annoyances like finding out that my channel lineup didn’t really change but you went on ahead and completely shuffled the channel numbers. I can almost forgive you that little change as your reasoning behind it actually made some sense. You told me you wanted to group similar channels together. That seemed logical to me. I was willing to overlook the fact that I was now going to have to reset all of my favorites again since you cleared them out with the channel changes. I was even willing to forgive you that you made me search through the channels for almost an hour to re-find the NOAA weather radar channel because your mailer describing the channels did not make this clear. Then I saw something that bothered me. I have six different ways to find each of my local stations! I can call up the main channel, which you tell me may or may not be in digital (that’s fine), but then I can bring up the same station on another channel which is definitely in digital. Then there’s the HD channel of the same station. If that’s not enough, I can go to a different section of the channels and flip through the local, local digital, and local high definition station all right next to each other. You increased the number of channels I can flip through, but didn’t touch anything in the way of increasing my actual content.

That’s not all you’ve done to my channel lineup though. I pay for the full digital content, yet I cannot get all the digital channels you tell me I can get. I can pull up Speed on the regular lineup, however, when I try and pull up Speed in digital format you tell me I’m not authorized to view that station (even though your mailed listing tells me I can). I know that getting annoyed over not being able to watch the Speed channel in digital format may make me sound like some sort of a high-tech hick, but give me a break. You may have upped my HBO listings so that I can now watch HBO East and HBO West and see the same things on twice as many channels, but don’t tell me on paper that I can watch the latest race in digital format and then deny me when I try to do it.