In a sign of growing consumer discontent over service outages resulting from the takeover of Adelphia Communications , former Adelphia and Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) subscribers are suing Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE: TWC) in Los Angeles as it grapples with system integration issues.
Beverly Hills law firm Glassman, Browning & Saltsman Inc. lodged the potential class-action lawsuit against Time Warner on behalf of one of the unhappy subscribers last week. The complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court just before Thanksgiving, charges that the nation's second largest MSO suffered numerous service breakdowns, broke pledges to its new subscribers, and didn't offer rebates or credits for cable outages after beginning the process of integrating the old Adelphia and Comcast systems last month.
"This widespread disruption made a mockery of [Time Warner's] promises that these cable services would not be interrupted as a result of the migration, and that they would provide plaintiffs with high-quality customer service," the suit alleges. Among other things, the complaint charges the MSO with breach of contract, franchise violations, fraud and deceit, and negligent misrepresentation.
The suit seeks damages, attorneys' fees, interest payments, and other compensation for the aggrieved subscribers.
The plaintiffs are also seeking class-action status, which would allow the suit to cover potentially all of the 1.6 million new Time Warner customers in the Los Angeles area.
Time Warner Cable, which previously had only 350,000 cable subscribers in that market, inherited 1.1 million customers as part of its Adelphia buyout and another 500,000 through a related system swap with Comcast. As a result, its cable market share has jumped from a mere 15 percent to a commanding 75 percent.
The legal action comes after weeks of complaints by former Adelphia and Comcast subscribers that Time Warner has been bungling the massive switchover from the two other companies' operations. Customers have griped about losing broadband service for days on end, getting their emails blocked, experiencing unwanted changes in their TV channel lineups, and suffering long waits for customer service and tech support.
"We appear to have hit a raw nerve," says Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, a partner at Glassman, Browning & Saltsman. "Consumers have been driven around the bend."
Rufus-Isaacs says he filed the suit in response to initial complaints from "half a dozen" cable subscribers and local press reports about the outages. Contending that Time Warner's actions "seemed a particularly outrageous violation" of law, Rufus-Isaacs says he has since heard from more than 20 other subscribers.
"We have been deluged with people calling in and emailing in," he says. "I dare say we'll be adding these additional people."
Citing the company's long-standing policy, a Time Warner Cable spokesman declined comment on the suit and said he couldn't estimate the extent of the problems. The complaint has not yet been served against the MSO.
Time Warner is not the only MSO to run into pesky service problems while trying to integrate Adelphia's operations into its own. As reported last month, Comcast has encountered plenty of headaches converting Adelphia systems in such Northeastern markets as Pittsburgh and Burlington, Vt.
But the Los Angeles situation is a particularly problematic one for Time Warner, as it's struggling to integrate a huge mish-mash of 16 cable headends, 69 cable hubs, and 30,000 miles of plant spread over a sprawling five-county area.
Time Warner is also trying to pull together three large cable systems with more than 100 different TV channel lineups, eight different set-top box models, four different cable modem models, three different billing systems, and three different video-on-demand (VOD) platforms. So it's not terribly surprising that it's experiencing so many technical glitches in L.A.
At the same time that it's working on the Los Angeles market, Time Warner is integrating large Adelphia and Comcast systems in Buffalo, N.Y.; Cleveland; and Dallas. But the L.A. operations still dwarf all of those.
You can not compare a cable company to you tube. sorry. how do you think you tube gets into the house? over a network. cable is a network, not a web page. completely different.
There were tools available for TWC and Comcast to use and have ready prior to the transition that could have avoided a good number of these calls. At the very least tools do exist today that would have made many subscribers at least have the feeling that someone was concerned enough to think of them during the transition period. There is no majic bullet to these issues (as they are very complex) but there are things that could have been done, and still can be, to make the impacted sub feel as if he/she has a say in how the process is completed. Just a matter of spending a few $$ to keep subs happy in the long run.
"Unless you're having great success with Time Warner or you're an employee ao (worse yet, a majority stockholder) you have NO CLUE how screwed up this transition has been. I have transmissions that stop and start in a freeze-frame, herky-jerky motion that is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE. I have met my limit with s****y CATV service, not that Adelphia was any great shakes, but these guys are just plain useless!"
The transition to TWC at this point, is in name only. The people managing this transition are the same Adelphia bufoons that built it. Need I say more?
As with any Adelphia asset, (where the Rigas family didn't know WTF they were buying, TWX really didn't know what they were getting into when they bought these systems. Now they're finding out. Fortunately, I only use Adelphia for HSD, but recently switched over to an authenticating outgoing mailserver, so I no longer have to rely upon their mailhosting services -- thank G-d.
"I'm tired of jacked-up prices, limited programming and bad transmissions; and AND BRING BACK NFL NETWORK, DAMMIT! Before this is all over, it's going to be closer to 2.6 MILLION subscribers, not 26."
As another poster advised, switch to a dish. That's what I did back in 2000 after my cable went out an hour before the Lakers 7th game against Portland in the NBA finals. Never been happier since.
As for YouTube, what's the relevance? None. Maybe in 5 years when 90 percent of the programming subs watch will beVOD. But today, that's not the story. VOD is just a small piece of the pie, which I can live w/o so long as I have a DVR to time shift. Quit shilling for YouTube; it's irrelevant. It'll do fine.
MSOs operate disparate legacy systems, some of which are bound to create problems when merged into one homogenous clustered system. This is nothing new. What is new is that we in LA have a bunch of less than 1st class people inherited from a 2-bit cable company that should have never been able to buy its way into the LA market trying to do something they are ill-equipped to handle. They don't understand how these systems were built & configured. If they did, they could avoid these problems, or at the very least, provide advanced notices when the network will be down -- like most professional operations do. But they don't. You got it right CLUELESS is the word to describe the people managing this transition.
"The fact is, YouTube is sending on-demand video around the planet with a staff of 70 or so people. They do not need billions of dollars of investment, or armies of technicians, or years or months of contract negotiations with content providers, or IMS or CSCO CRS-1 routers or special set-top boxes. They are doing it now, on what-ever network is available. It may not have the best quality, but it is good enough for millions of people."
I've had a couple of YouTube videos time out. As I am "paying" for this service by looking at Advertisements, YouTube has unwritten contractual obligation to deliver uninteruppted service to me.
I am thinking of suing YouTube based on these grounds. Who's with me?
Of course, if migratory African Swallows get involved, our charge against the YouTube castle will be met with taunts and more taunts. :-0
It may not have the best quality, but it is good enough for millions of people.
Exactly. If Time Warner offered their video service for free, it would be good enough for millions too, even when flaky.
However, when consumer pay for home entertainment video, they they typically want to watch it on their TV and expect good video quality and reliabilty. YouTube would not make the cut on that basis today. It would be very cool if this were possible in the future, though.
The fact is, YouTube is sending on-demand video around the planet with a staff of 70 or so people. They do not need billions of dollars of investment, or armies of technicians, or years or months of contract negotiations with content providers, or IMS or CSCO CRS-1 routers or special set-top boxes. They are doing it now, on what-ever network is available. It may not have the best quality, but it is good enough for millions of people.
If we had open standards for this stuff, it would not be so complicated and these problems would not happen. How often does YouTube go down?
Essentially, every aspect of an MSO's IP service infrastructure is based on open standards. However, that's no guarantee they will operate these standards-based products in way that enables reliable service. :)
Digital video is a whole different story for cable, of course. That said, any comparison to YouTube is a stretch. Satellite or telco TV is far more analagous.
Sorry you are having a difficult time with TW. If you want to send them a message, then switch to a sattelite service. That's what I did when I got sick of Comcast's ever-escalating cable bills. I guarantee that losing subscribers by the thousands will get a lot more attention than this lawsuit. Of course, it won't make any lawyers rich. Oh wait, that's a good thing.
> If we had open standards for this stuff, it would not be so complicated > and these problems would not happen. How often does YouTube go down?
Yes it would be 'this complicated'.
YouTube has a bunch of servers and 2 minute video clips. They've never had to deal with a service delivery infrastructure of any sort, let alone combining three different ones. I'm not saying that TW is doing a wonderful job with their switchovers [frankly, this isn't the first time I've heard testimony to suggest they aren't handling it very well] but that isn't an effect of whether the services are based on a particular standard.
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