Time Warner Cable has been so inundated with complaints as it has taken over neighborhoods formerly served by Comcast and Adelphia that the company is slowing its rollout and offering discounts and freebies to mollify customers.
Viewers swamped Time Warner call centers after engineers started three weeks ago to integrate Southern California systems acquired from Comcast Corp. and Adelphia Communications Corp.
Complaints abound of canceled channels, digital TV forced on customers, Internet connections lost, e-mail accounts botched and arrogant service -- once, that is, a live person finally answers the phone.
Although he's endured a number of cable TV transitions in a decade of industry consolidation, Hancock Park recording engineer Phil Braen said, "the transition to Time Warner has been, by far, the rockiest."
Recognizing that, Time Warner decided to take a few more weeks -- until early January -- to complete its channel lineup changes and Internet service conversion, spokeswoman Patti Rockenwagner said. The second wave of standardizing the channel lineups, which was to have begun last Wednesday, will begin a week later instead.
"I would urge customers to consider this like remodeling the kitchen," Rockenwagner said. "You pull down cupboards and move everything out, but when you put it all back, you have the kitchen of your dreams. This is not a convenient process, but with the changes, we can offer better service down the road."
The company will offer thank-you gifts over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend of 1-cent movies on demand and free viewing of subscription-only National Basketball Assn. games. Separately, the company is offering its Southern California customers lower-cost Internet and digital TV service for a year.
Time Warner joined with Comcast in July to buy properties from bankrupt Adelphia. The two companies then swapped territories to give each other larger shares of different metropolitan areas. Time Warner ended up with 1.9 million customers from Ventura to Newport Beach to Hemet -- covering nearly all of the city of Los Angeles.
In exchange, Comcast took over Time Warner's customers in Northern California.
Complaints erupted Oct. 21, when Time Warner began realigning channels as it started switching 220,000 Comcast Internet customers from Comcast's system to its own. Many turned on their home computers and found they couldn't get to their e-mail accounts.
