Wednesday night. I’m feeling kinda sleepy, and as much as I want to stay up and watch Nashville (who died, Peggy the scheming political aide who married Teddy the mayor, or Will the conflicted country singer who was last seen standing on a railroad track), I’m thinking it’s better for me to get some sleep and watch it in the morning as part of an ABC.com streaming video service.
Thursday morning. Up and at ’em. I check ABC.com’s website. Hmm. The most recent Nashville episode was the midseason cliffhanger from a month ago. I guess they haven’t uploaded the new episode to the website yet.
Later that morning, I checked on another computer. Yeah, I really want to watch Nashville, in case you hadn’t figured it out.
Wait, what’s this “verify to watch” reference?
Okay, I see AT&T, Cox, Verizon FIOS, xfinity, some other companies that I don’t recognize … hmm, no Time Warner Cable… how much does anybody want to bet that being a subscriber to Time Warner Cable will keep me from watching this week’s episode of Nashville online?
I filled in my info. Provider? I listed Time Warner Cable.
Yep. Here we go again.
I put up with this malarkey less than six months ago, when CBS and Time Warner Cable were having their little tiff. Heck, I had to put up with these two companies as they recreated a temper tantrum at grade school recess, to the point where I couldn’t even watch the Smithsonian Channel for about a month because of the Time Warner/CBS petulance.
So what do I do at this point?
Well, from what I can gather, being a Time Warner Cable subscriber means that if an episode of a new ABC show airs – from Nashville to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to Once Upon A Time to Once Upon A Time In Wonderland, I won’t be able to watch the new episode online for at least a week. Maybe the show will appear on the OnDemand Time Warner Cable channel (100), but with ABC it takes a couple of days for them to place the new episodes on that portal.
I could order a subscription of Nashville on iTunes, and then I could easily watch the new episodes on the morning after their airing. But honestly, I like watching Nashville once per episode. I don’t need to save every episode of it.
But yeah. Once again, being a Time Warner Cable customer apparently puts me behind the eight-ball every time something like this occurs. Two years ago, there was a dispute between WTEN and Time Warner Cable. Last June, A&E and TruTV blocked access to their product if you were a Time Warner subscriber. And I’m still trying to find my favorite cable channels after TWC scrambled up their cable lineup last October. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, TruTV is still blocking Time Warner subscribers from watching TruTV shows online.
This is getting too old too fast.
I placed a phone call to Time Warner Cable.
After fifteen minutes of plowing through TWC phone jail, I finally got a human customer service representative. Who at first wanted me to verify that my internet was working. It is. He then tried to sell me a Time Warner TV watch-on-computer app. No, that’s not what I want. I want to watch all the ABC shows I want, and I want to watch them whenever and wherever I choose, and I don’t want to be penalized because I’m a Time Warner Cable customer.
This is the “vintage 78 RPM phonograph” defense. Because I’m just going round and round like a broken record.
The Time Warner rep put me on hold. On. Hold. For. What. Seemed. Like. An. E. Ter. Ni. Ty.
And when the rep returned to the line – 20 minutes later – he read an e-mail to me that said, in effect, ABC is restricting its online “Watch ABC” feature to certain cable companies. New episodes are blocked for eight days after their initial airing. So this means that it might take me a week and a half to watch last night’s Nashville online. Hello, net neutrality.
The Time Warner rep told me that I could still watch old ABC shows on the Time Warner OnDemand channel if I wanted to. Well, isn’t that nice. It’s once again a case of being promised one thing and receiving another.
When I got home last night, I tried to see if there was an alternative option. And sure enough, there was. I purchased an AppleTV module a couple of years ago, and it looks as if they’ve added some viewing options to their set-top box. I can register my AppleTV with PBS… well, that was easy. And looky here, there’s the application for the Watch ABC app…
Just what I’m looking for. Ha. I’m gonna watch ABC streaming through my AppleTV… all I have to do is register…
Oh no. The Watch ABC app is asking what cable provider I currently use. And yes, friends and associates, Time Warner Cable is NOT one of the offered choices. So that was a waste of time.
So here we go again. Joe Consumer gets rooked over ONCE AGAIN because he subscribes to Time Warner Cable. ABC blocks coverage once again because – well, hey, it’s an over-the-air network, but it can do whatever it wants. And what happens to us? What happens to the loyal viewers who are promised this nice level of interaction and channel-shifting and convenience?
Well, if you’re a Time Warner Cable subscriber, it’s just plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
And I know there are people that are screaming at their computers, “Chuck, get a freakin’ DVR already. And you won’t have to worry about all this. And by the way, Crazy Peggy died on Nashville, so I just saved you an hour of viewing time.”
Thanks, man. You’re probably the person who also told everyone that the ending of Breaking Bad follows the old Marty Robbins’ song “El Paso.”
Yeah. I could get a Time Warner Cable DVR. And I could add a few extra dollars to my already-too-high-for-a-reasonable-person-to-pay cable bill. Yeah. That’s about as straight as a squareknot.
Congratulations, Time Warner Cable. Just when I think that being a subscriber to your cable service is the lowest possible thing out there…
You hand me a shovel and convince me to keep digging lower.
Chuck The Writer 
Broken Record here: Dish is g-r-e-a-t! 🙂
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I’m done with TWC. I unplugged a few months ago and have never been happier (still have their internet package, though).
Instead, I subscribe to both Hulu+ (to watch Nashville, among other things) and Amazon Prime. Between the two, I can catch just about everything I want. And, I still use the library to binge-watch shows that air on the premium channels.
Just an option to throw out there…
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We unplugged a few months back from TWC -don’t even have internet-
It is the most freeing feeling going and do not regret our decision at all. Was SO SICK of Time Warner and feeling like I was always being ripped off.
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I have a DVR with TWC. It’s shaking season, and there was about 10 hours of skating last weekend, and that was ALL that was recorded, but the DVR was already at 76% full! So my wife called them. The CSR said that we should be rebooting our box at least once a month. I will say it fixed the problem; the percentage went down to 38%.
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By rebooting, do we have to actually unplug it and plug it back in? I can do that but it’s a pain. I had this weird full problem last year where a single 1/2 hour show was taking up more than 50% of the DVR. It seemed to go away eventually.
But now, I have a new problem – when watching a DVR’ed show, the progress bar isn’t showing up while I fast forward or rewind.
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And also – it only recorded half of a two hour show last week.
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Do not get me started… UGH!
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Ditched cable last year and went with digital antennea and Roku player where we subscribe to Hulu plus and Netflix. There is also a free PBS channel on the Roku player. Tons of stuff to watch. And with Hulu Plus, you get the ABC shows the next day.
Only downside is no sports that are on cable. We’re sports people, but we are finding that we don’t miss it that much. Makes our weekends a little bit more freeing.
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As you go outside today, look up! It looks like more than half the people on the Island have Satellite! Ask your Landlord if you can have a provider, they may say yes since you have lived there awhile.
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Neither Satellite provider is listed on the ABC streaming pic he posted, hence not solving his problem.
I’m having this issue with TWC and the HistoryChannel app on the Roku, they have about 3 dozen supported internet providers, somehow TWC, one of the largest is not..
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When the executives wonder why people torrent everything, THIS is the answer.
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EXACTLY!
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The only solution to this problem is competition, and there needs to be more action to prompt that competition to come to the area. Government subsidies for expanding modern telecommunications infrastructure, such as fiber optics, would help solve the problem. FiOS is only available to a fraction of the population in our area, and satellite is also not always available depending on your rent/own living situation. Plus, satellite doesn’t provide internet that you’d need to stream things anyway. To be sure, people have had plenty of complaints about FiOS, but if they’re not a true “Coke-to-Pepsi” competitor in the area due to limited access, we can’t expect there to be much change with anything. This telecommunications monopoly needs to be broken up one way or another.
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Last March I cut the TWC cord when FiOS became available in my neighborhood.
FiOS isn’t perfect, but it’s ridiculously better than TWC ever was.
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I’d get FIOS immediately… if it were available in my area. I’ve been waiting FOR YEARS, too.
Guess Verizon doesn’t want business from where I live. Ah well.
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No Fios so I am stuck with Time Warner internet. We also have TW Security. We have Dish for TV and I love it.
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Get HULU+.
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Here’s the issue I’ve never heard reference to: doesn’t every provider – TWC, FIOS, etc. have a legal agreement with the local city or municipality? and doesn’t that municipality have SOME leverage against these people?
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Time Warner is ( as is the entire industry ) struggling to deal with the fact that with the internet and a website like http://eztv.it , they’re no longer gatekeepers. Well, they’re still extracting tolls and rent. I mean, you still PAY Time Warner every month plenty of money for internet service, you just get the bits off the internet instead of a dvr.
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Saying that “Verizon is better than XYZ” simply shows that they haven’t been burned yet by their favorite vendor. They will. They ALL suck.
At least Verizon is Union, and that’s a big plus.
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Unions… are they still around? I thought they strangled most every business by now…except government, but that’s another story.
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Chuck,
While I share your disdain for the current situation, and of TimeWarner in particular, this is *not* an issue of “net neutrality”
“Note neutrality” would better be called “no internet discrimination”.
Absent neutrality, a carrier might privilege some data packets and protocols over others. Thus, an ISP might decide to make their own video calling service look better than Skype or Google Hangouts by delaying the packets for those two services. Similarly, TimeWarner might decide that they are going to treat the packets for that TimeWarner app you mentioned better than the packets for Hulu.
—
What you are complaining about is a result of the networks wanting to squeeze as much money out of the various distribution channels. And one of those channels is cable TV. Large and popular networks like ABC (owned by Disney, which also owns ESPN) have agreements in place to get the cable companies to pay them for the privilege of carrying their signals. The networks guard this revenue stream jealously (just look at their suits against Aereo!) and so do a number of things to make sure that the cable companies know that the networks are in charge.
So I’d guess that Time Warner does not want to pay as much as for the ABC/ESPN family of networks as Disney wants to extract.
ABC is also guarding advertising revenue. Discouraging you from watching On Demand later is good for their bottom line. Advertisers pay ABC to run ads inside “Nashville”. Part of what they pay for is a particular audience at a particular time, say, Wednesday night. (Indeed, large advertisers will often try to “roadblock” by putting the same ad on at the same time across many different networks.) So when you watch the On Demand version you can’t be counted as a “proper” viewer of those ads. Additionally, the ad breaks in On Demand programming are often shorter that the over-the-air breaks. So, less potential revenue.
Is this isolated to ABC? Did you ask TWC what the other networks do for On Demand? Do CBS and NBC also make TWC customers wait 8 days? Perhaps this is an industry standard.
Lastly, this entire situation is made even more hairy when you think about the fact that one of the largest family of networks (NBC) is actually owned by a cable company (Comcast). Imagine if you were a Comcast customer, might you be in a situation where you could watch NBC On Demand an hour after broadcast but have to wait eight days for CBS?
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We switched to Direct TV, and couldn’t be happier. Our TW bill had gotten out of hand. You could switch, add DVR, and still be paying less than half of what you are paying TW now. Unfortunately, we had to keep TW for internet because there isn’t an alternative available. I wish there was!
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I’ve always been amuse when TWC (or Cablevision or Comcast) claim to NOT be a monopoly because there are options – problem is, not everyone can take advantage of those “options”. And we, Joe and Josephine Consumer, will continue to pay the price of Congress’ refusal to deal with this!
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“He then tried to sell me a Time Warner TV watch-on-computer app”
That’s actually free, ABC is one of the networks available, and it’s current up to the same episode that’s on the ABC website. Is that what the rep was trying to explain?
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I hate to break up everyone’s Time Warner spleen-venting session, but I have a somewhat different opinion.
Chuck, while I agree with your overall point, I do think you’re being a bit of a baby in this particular case. I’m writing this Friday night/Saturday morning; as of right now, the most recent episode of Nashville is available on Time Warner’s Primetime On Demand channel. You didn’t say whether you checked again before you wrote this post early Friday morning, but I’m assuming the episode wasn’t there then and was put up sometime Friday. You mean to tell us you couldn’t wait a day, maybe two, to watch your show? Come on, man. You’re too young to be this cranky.
Again, I agree with you on the larger issue of content providers and ISPs conspiring to shut people out based on which megalith enjoys the monopoly over your region, but at the same time, you gotta pick your battles.
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This morning time warner informed me that they will only download primetime on demand at the end of the month and that is when you can watch March shows
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