Time Warner profits up 22 percent

Boost seen from phone, Internet services

9:51 PM, Jan. 27, 2011
The Associated Press

NEW YORK — Time Warner Cable Inc. booked a 22 percent jump in fourth-quarter profit Thursday as it enticed more customers to upgrade to pricier bundles of cable, Internet and phone service. And it was feeling confident enough to boost its dividend payout 20 percent.

The company has roughly 600,000 customers in Wisconsin and employs about 600 people at its operations center in Appleton. The country's second largest cable company lost another 141,000 cable TV subscribers, its second-biggest quarterly loss ever. Growth came instead from its high-speed Internet and phone businesses.

Additional information
These links will open in a new window:
♦ Retail news in Maureen Wallenfang's Buzz Blog
♦ Sign up for news, weather and sports text alerts.

The company added 94,000 Internet customers and 72,000 phone customers. That's likely to fuel speculation that video on the Web has begun to encroach on the cable industry.
TV executives have dismissed the idea that viewers are abandoning cable. But an ever increasing number of options for watching TV online — Hulu, Netflix and the like — have made the idea of so-called cord cutting more thinkable. Netflix Inc., which continues to make more TV shows and movies available for streaming over the Web, added 3.1 million customers in the fourth quarter.
Pressed to comment on potential cord-cutting, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt questioned how sustainable the Netflix model really is. He said the company and those like it are essentially acting as extra middle men between the companies that create entertainment and those that deliver it.
"I'd question what the real value is of what they're doing," Britt said.
Many investors disagree. Netflix shares tripled last year to give the company a nearly $10 billion market value.
Other factors may play a role in Time Warner's subscriber losses, including a sluggish economy and defections to competing cable or satellite TV providers.
Britt said Time Warner Cable is moving to heighten the appeal of cable, adding more high-definition channels and expanding the selection of on-demand movies and shows. He also predicted that over the long term, customers will be able to bypass the nuisance of set-top boxes as TV sets become more sophisticated.

http://www.postcrescent.com/article/201 ... nav%7Chead