It came with little warning and changed the lives of millions overnight.
Hundreds of channels on Time Warner Cable have been rearranged into what the company describes as a “theme-based lineup,” supposedly grouping them by content — and causing confusion and fury among subscribers.
Channels 1-99 haven’t changed, but pretty much everything else has — and channels 100-145 (labeled Entertainment) seem to have little in common. They include USA, Syfy, MTV, VH1, Hallmark, the National Geographic Channel, Animal Planet, Comedy Central and El Rey.
But then there’s a Music block (285-297) that has MTV Jams and CMT, but not MTV or VH1 — OK, the latter two don’t have much to do with music anymore, but still.
The Life & Style block (160-187) has channels like HGTV, Food and Travel (that makes sense), but also Lifetime, BET, GSN (the Game Show Network) and Ovation (arts programming).
The changes, which began to roll out in late May, first in Staten Island, New Jersey and Mount Vernon and later in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, were completed on Tuesday. And many customers are fuming.
“The new lineup is just the latest bit of frustration from a company that again and again has provided me with too many headaches to count,” said Christina Peterson of Manhattan. “It’s completely disorganized and poorly run, TWC deserves to go out of business.”
But Time Warner officials claim the new lineup has been well received.
“Customer feedback has been positive since we began introducing the new theme-based lineup in June 2013 in TWC’s other markets in the U.S.,” Time Warner Cable New York spokeswoman Ziggy Chau said.
“We’re doing everything we can to help customers prepare for the new lineup: our website has information readily available including the new lineup, a “How-To” video, FAQs and our Care agents are ready to assist customers if they have difficulty finding a channel/program. We’re confident customers will find the new lineup easier to navigate and have an easier time finding their favorite programming.”
But customers — many of whom reached out to The News — feel differently.
“Occasionally, a cable system will rejigger some channels and then you have to kind of rememorize where some are, but this is really amazing,” said Adam, another Manhattan resident. “Plus for reasons the customer service people can’t even explain (I asked today), the first 100 channels are, for the most part, repeated from Channels 101-199.”
Calls by The News to Time Warner’s customer service garnered the same result.
“I really can’t explain it myself,” a company customer rep said.
Chau said customers were first notified of the changes back in April with a letter, brochure and the new channel lineup via regular mail and email.
