Time Warner Cable

I've always admired the way phone companies charge a monthly fee for people not to be listed in a phone book. I mean, talk about chutzpah -- charging customers to not receive a service they didn't even ask for in the first place. But Time Warner Cable takes the cake. The company charges 99 cents a month for its telephone customers to not be listed in a directory that the company doesn't even publish. Time Warner outsources the entire operation.

Responding to a decline in advertiser spending, CBS plans to cut capital spending to $350 million in 2009 from $500 million in 2008, Chief Executive Leslie Moonves said at an investor conference in Phoenix. Moonves' comments came the same day the company announced it had struck a new five-year deal with Time Warner Cable to carry the CBS-owned TV stations and co-owned Showtime pay-TV networks. As part of the agreement, Time Warner obtained the right to include some CBS programming as part of the cable operator's time-shifting and video-on-demand services.

The Federal Communications Commission has approved the spinoff of Time Warner Cable, the nation's second largest cable operator, from parent Time Warner Inc. The approval was one of the main regulatory hurdles to the spinoff, which the companies expect to complete by the end of March. Final approval requires a tax letter from the Internal Revenue Service. Time Warner owns 85% of Time Warner Cable shares.

It was the sort of tip that would have made for a great column -- if it were true. A Los Angeles customer of Time Warner Cable Inc. e-mailed to say he just learned that the company had sneakily inserted new language into its contract allowing it to start charging Internet users higher monthly fees for network-heavy activities such as downloading movies.

Facing a backlash from TV viewers furious at the prospect of losing "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Dora the Explorer," two media giants reached a new programming agreement that keeps those popular cartoon characters on the channels of the country's second-largest cable operator. Viacom Inc. had threatened to pull 19 of its cable channels, including Nickelodeon, MTV, VH-1 and Comedy Central, from the Time Warner Cable Inc. systems at midnight Wednesday when their previous two-year contract expired.

Call it the anti-Hulu. Media giants Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. are expected to announce this morning they are teaming up on a new venture that would make it harder for people to watch TV shows online for free. Motivating the two companies is the emergence of online video as an alternative to TV. Hulu, the video website owned by News Corp., NBC Universal and soon, the Walt Disney Co., has become an overnight sensation with its plentiful supply of TV shows for free.

Time Warner Cable Inc. will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday. The nation's second-largest cable provider will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

Time Warner Inc. said Wednesday that it was splitting AOL into two parts in a move analysts predicted would pave the way for a sale of the slumping Internet-access business that made the online pioneer famous. Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes, in his first conference call with analysts since succeeding Richard Parsons as CEO in December, said the company was optimistic about AOL's faster-growing content and advertising sales business.

Roll the credits on New Line Cinema, the 40-year-old studio behind such iconic movie franchises as "The Lord of the Rings," "Austin Powers" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street." The company will lay off hundreds of employees between its Los Angeles and New York facilities and be merged into its corporate sibling, Warner Bros. The consolidation marks the end of the line for the once scrappy producer that prided itself on taking creative risks that other studios wouldn't.

Stephen Pagano, brought in a year ago to help Time Warner Cable Inc. work through a botched effort to combine the operations of three Southern California cable systems, was promoted to a new position overseeing the cable TV giant's Western region. Pagano, a 26-year veteran of Time Warner, was named executive vice president for a region covering 2.5 million customers in Los Angeles, San Diego and Hawaii.