Time Warner Time Warner Cable Open Letter to Glenn Britt New York, New York

This is an open letter to Glenn Britt, and references the following article: 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57485904-93/pay-tv-is-on-the-ebb-as-customers-cut-the-cord/

Dear Mr. Britt, 

In this article, you are quoted as saying the following: "We actually think a bigger issue in the market is that there is a group of customers that are in really serious financial shape, they have been out of work for a long time."

This must be why cable in general, and your company in particular, continues to gouge its remaining pool of dwindling customers. Smart consumers will always find a way to pay for products and services that have a perceived value equal to or above the money they are shelling out. Cable is a sad example of what happens when that scenario is reversed. 

The cable companies have succeeded in lobbying the government to create highly non-competitive local market environments resulting in a lack of choices to the consumer. This was great for the cable company serving those individual markets up until recently because it allowed them to shove arbitrary price hikes down people's throats. Then the product became lackluster, and customer service fell into an abyss, all due to lack of market competition. 

But the pure hatred and loathing people have for cable companies has spawned myriad new services that have adopted the internet as a delivery channel. This channel is not governed by your FCC butt boys and legislative lackeys. This is the free market coming back to eat you alive and spit out your bones. 

I am a Time Warner customer who has 0 options for cable television outside of Time Warner, of course. I cannot hang a dish due to building policy, and I have no other cable option in my area thanks to your well honed lobbying apparatus and deregulation in 1996. I am forced to pay well over $100 for a "bundle" that includes a phone service I will never use, slow "broadband" internet, and basic cable with a pinch of HBO and HD with DVR. On top of that, the OD (on demand) service is a disgusting mess with different channels all over the place, ie: one OD channel for HBO, another for network show (where I cannot fast forward through commercials), and another for science and nature channels, etc. ad nauseum. 

(http://broadcastengineering.com/news/broadcasting_cable_deregulation_failure/). 

Most egregiously, there are shows I cannot record at all now on the networks, and quite a few that do not allow me to fast forward through the stupid f***ing commercials, just like in OD. This is why I pay you a $15-20 service fee every month for an HD DVR, you greedy incompetents. When I pause a show in OD, I have to endure an extremely annoying loop of garbage advertising for content I have no interest in watching. My DVR is a two tuner piece of s**t that forces me to watch one of the shows I am recording if I am recording two shows at the same time, and will not let me watch live TV. Don't even get me started on the 500 channels I have to pay for but never watch. 

As a consumer of your product, I give you an F minus. Your product is way beyond just sucking, your pricing is way out of whack and you and your executive team are obviously very out of touch with the reality of why people are opting out of your incredibly shitty, anti customer offering. If it were not for my girlfriend and her obsessive need to keep up with True Blood and Breaking Bad as newepisodes come out, (yes, I could get them on the internet if I wanted to watch on my laptop with no HDMI out) you would be banished from our household forthwith. I have agreed that we will wait til season endings for those and then drop it. 

Also, I happen to live in Kansas City where Google just got finished hanging a bunch of fiber. For roughly the same price I am paying to you, I will have Google powered television, rocket powered internet, a bad a*s 8 tuner DVR, a nifty Galaxy tablet to change my channels and their connection will actually add value to my residence. BE AFRAID. You and the rest of the cable purveyors out there deserve to go into the h**lish abyss of failed vertical markets due to greed and complacency. Maybe I will be really lucky and the networks will die along with the cable companies. FIN