Time Warner to Avoid Marketing 'Quad Play'
By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld -- Multichannel News, 1/16/2007 4:50:00 PM
New York -- Time Warner Cable will not market wireless communications as a fourth base in a “quad play” of services, along with television programming, Internet access and digital telephony, its chief marketing officer said Tuesday evening.
The nation’s second-largest cable operator will instead market the services of its existing “triple play” of TV, telephone and Internet access, as well as new services that will blend aspects of the three, as “Time Warner Cable on the go,” Sam Howe said at a demonstration of the company’s product lineup at the Time Warner Center here.
The company -- which now serves more than 1.6 million telephone customers amid its 13.5 million cable-TV subscribers -- plans to allow its wireless customers to receive 27 different TV-programming services, including live feeds of Fox News Channel and others, according to Peter Stern, executive vice president of product management. Customers will also be able to pull up their home TV listings on their mobile phones and, by the end of this year, instruct digital-video recorders in their set-top boxes to record programs they can watch when they get home.
They will get alerts on their hand-held phones of messages when they arrive in their voice mailboxes at home and be able to read and send e-mail using their home Internet accounts.
“This is not a quad play,” Howe said.
Like other cable operators involved in deploying mobile services in a joint venture with Sprint Nextel, Time Warner will sell packages of mobile communications at rates that equal those of Sprint itself, in straight comparisons of minutes used. Prices will range from $29.95-$99.95 per month, Howe said.
That pricing can make it difficult to offer any sort of quad play that involves discounting, which is a hallmark of triple-play marketing. Typically, triple plays are marketed at about $100 per month, and those plays are priced as if telephone service were free, or close to it.
Time Warner is close to announcing its formal name for its “mobile-access” service. Howe said the name was developed in conjunction with advertising agency TBWAChiatDay, the U.S. division of TBWA Worldwide; it is a common word associated with “portability” and “mobility”; and it had to be acquired from another firm, which he would not identify, before it could be used.
Howe’s comments came during a tour of the MSO’s 45,000-square-foot, four-story demonstration of Time Warner interactive services called Home to the Future, which will open at the Time Warner Center in February. The demo ties together 500 TVs with nearly one mile of cabling.
In the preshow tour, Stern, Howe and Time Warner Cable president and CEO Glenn Britt also said:
• A video channel bearing the Road Runner high-speed-Internet brand will debut online by the end of the month. The service will include video that is pulled from Web sites, but not video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Revver.
• Its Road Runner portal on the Web gets 5 million different visitors daily.
• Displaying the identification of incoming telephone calls on a TV screen is now available in one-half of its cable-system divisions
• One-third of customers who subscribe to its digital-TV services have digital-video recorders and one-fourth have HDTV sets.
• The operator is delivering 100 million streams of video programming on-demand to its TV customers each month.
• Interactive polling is now available to 3.6 million of its digital customers and, typically, 25% of those watching a show respond when a poll is presented.
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