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Time Warner Cable is a national cable television company that operates in 27 states and has 31 operating divisions. Its corporate headquarters are located in Stamford, Connecticut; Houston, Texas; and in Charlotte, North Carolina. It is a division of Time Warner Inc.

History

Time Warner Cable was formed in 1989 through the merger of Time Inc.'s cable television company, American Television and Communications Corp., and Warner Cable, a division of Warner Communications.

Acquisition of Adelphia

Time Warner Cable and Comcast are in the process of purchasing Adelphia for $18 billion. Time Warner Inc. is giving Adelphia stockholders 16% stock of Time Warner Cable, along with the deal. Now Adelphia is working out the deal. If this acquisition goes through, Adelphia will split up its regions. This will cause TWC to be the second biggest cable company, behind Comcast. Also, TWC will have 27 million subscribers, from the 19 million subscribers currently, an 8 million increase. The TWC basic cable customers will go up 3.5 million, from 11.5 million to 14.5 million

Advance/Newhouse and Time Warner

Some of the regional cable system clusters operated by Time Warner Cable are owned by the Time Warner Entertainment - Advance/Newhouse Partnership (TWEAN). In 2002, Advance/Newhouse Communications, unhappy with some of the operating policies of Time Warner Cable in the AOL Time Warner era, forced a restructuring of the TWEAN partnership such that Advance/Newhouse would actively manage and operate a portion of the jointly owned cable systems equal to their percentage of equity. Under this arrangement, Advance/Newhouse enjoys the proceeds of their actively managed systems rather than simply a percentage of the partnerships total earnings. The majority of the affected systems are in the Tampa and Orlando markets under the Bright House Networks brand.

The value of this deal is that it allows Advance/Newhouse to more directly control their cable investments without having to completely unravel the TWEAN partnership, which does bring some benefits via Time Warner's development and purchasing clout.

Sprint Nextel Venture

In late 2005, TWC and several other cable companies formed a venture with Sprint Nextel. This caused TWC customers to receive a full suite of products, linking in-home and out-of-home entertainment, information, and communications services. All of this was included in the new "Quadruple Play", similar to the Triple Play but an addition of new services through Sprint Nextel.

Start Over

Start Over allows customers to jump to the beginning of a program in progress without any preplanning or in-home recording devices and is available to digital cable subscribers at no additional charge.

History

Start Over was first launched to customers in South Carolina in November 2005. Time Warner Cable announced Start Over will become available this summer to customers in Greensboro, North Carolina; Rochester, New York; and San Antonio, Texas. In South Carolina, Time Warner Cable has made the Start Over functionality available on select programming from 62 networks.

Beginning in June, Time Warner Cable will deploy Start Over to customers in San Antonio. Deployments will continue throughout the summer into Rochester, followed by Greensboro. The service will be systematically rolled out in each of these divisions, launching neighborhood by neighborhood until Start Over is available to all customers in the market. Time Warner Cable expects to launch Start Over to customers in another three to four divisions later this year.

About It

Start Over is enabled by a software upgrade to the existing video on demand (VOD) platform and to the installed base of digital set top boxes. The Start Over system instantaneously captures live television programming for immediate, on demand viewing.

When tuning to a Start Over-enabled show in progress, customers are alerted to the feature through an on-screen prompt. By pressing "Select" on the remote control, the program is restarted from the beginning. Commercials will appear in the same sequence of the show as they would have in the initial telecast. Start Over-enabled programs can be restarted within the shows' telecast window.

Statistics

Within six months Start Over has become one of the most popular advanced services launched by Time Warner Cable. Seventy percent of those able to use Start Over are doing so about seven times each month and more than two-thirds use Start Over three times per week.

Cable Clusters

Info as of 12/31/05. More than 75% of the company's customers are in systems of 300,000 subscribers or more.

Statistics

As of March 31, 2006, there were 11 million basic cable subscribers, 5.6 million dtv (Digital Cable) subscribers, 5.2 million Road Runner residential subscribers, 1.7 million DVR subscribers, and 1.4 million Digital Phone subscribers.

External links

Time Warner | 1989 establishments | Cable television companies of the United States | Media companies | Media companies of the United States | Entertainment companies | Entertainment companies of the United States

Time Warner Cable

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Time Warner Cable".

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