TWC Plans More Metered Broadband Markets This Year
Time Warner Cable plans to introduce its usage-based billing broadband product in more markets this year, CEO Glenn Britt told investors during the company’s Q1 earnings teleconference Thursday. TWC began selling the service in South Texas earlier this year at a lower price for consumers who use less data, and “our plan is to roll that out further across our footprint as the year goes on,” he said.
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TWC’s video and broadband customers who use TWC’s iPad streaming service or future IP video services won’t see that consumption count against their broadband limits, Britt said. “There’s a set of standards called IP, or Internet Protocol, and those can be used for a variety of things,” he said. “There’s also something called the public Internet, which happens to use IP standards,” he said. TWC’s video streaming to iPads and other devices doesn’t travel over the public Internet so it doesn’t count against broadband limits, he said.
"If we happened to encode the video in MPEG-2 nobody even thinks to ask the question does it count” against the limit, he said. “The fact that we choose to have another fee that’s encrypted in IP shouldn’t really change the outcome.”
Britt said TWC is open to working with device manufacturers on licensing its API, or application programming interface, to devices with new and innovative user interfaces. He was asked if the company would be willing make an API available to Apple should the company introduce a TV set. “We want to be on every device, and I think you'll see a whole variety of different user interfaces,” he said. “I don’t want to limit it to any one manufacturer. If people have devices with great user interfaces, we would definitely consider publishing our APIs to them and we're in discussions with a number of different companies about doing just that."
Executives also discussed TWC’s marketing partnership with Verizon Wireless and its proposed spectrum transaction. For now, the companies are offering in four markets what amounts to a discount for customers who buy Verizon Wireless service and upgrade at least one TWC product, Chief Operating Officer Rob Marcus said. But the goal over time is to move away from such bundled discounts and focus on “experiences that can only be experienced as a subscriber to both services,” Marcus said. “The goal would be to create value out of the linkage and the cooperation of the two companies,” he said. “The hope is that before year-end we'll have some additional features to talk about."
Asked what the company thinks about Aereo, the online-video startup being sued by broadcasters for copyright infringement, Britt said TWC is following the litigation. “If it’s found to be legal, not paying retransmission consent, it’s a very interesting thing,” he said.
Q1 sales at TWC gained 6.4 percent from a year earlier to $5.13 billion, helped by some $149 million in revenue from systems it had acquired in the last year. Net income gained 17.5 percent from a year earlier to $382 million.