Time Warner Cable is actually not owned by Time Warner, which is exclusively (or getting there) a content company.
The issue here is actually that the cable companies (TWC included, now as one of many clients of Time Warner's) provide huge dollars in a lump sum kind of way. The internet is still not a proven business model for distributing shows profitably.
While I agree with others in this thread that an a la carte model is the correct one and would likely work, there is very little middle ground for them (HBO, TW etc.) in between selling their shows to cable companies and going completely independent and distributing through the internet. As soon as they start doing that the cable companies will stop paying for their shows, and then at best there will be a long period of time while people switch over to consuming everything over the internet. Imagine how long it's going to take IE8 to disappear due to the fact that you can't upgrade to IE9+ w/o Vista+. Now imagine the upgrade I have to do is swapping out a cable box for a computer. Will you survive that gap, or will cable companies, wanting to continue to capitalize on the networks they've built, simply replace your content with someone else's?
This doesn't sound right. Shady sites that do nothing but provide ads for illegal downloads (e.g. megaupload) make tons of freakin' money and its not even legit. The problem seems like they half ass this stuff.
I mean if they're going to charge me $5 to watch a mediocre movie i'm going to pay them precisely $0 a week. If they charge me $1 to watch a movie I will probably watch 5 movies a week which gets them 5 of my bucks. They just need to go all in and stop messing around.
The issue here is actually that the cable companies (TWC included, now as one of many clients of Time Warner's) provide huge dollars in a lump sum kind of way. The internet is still not a proven business model for distributing shows profitably.
While I agree with others in this thread that an a la carte model is the correct one and would likely work, there is very little middle ground for them (HBO, TW etc.) in between selling their shows to cable companies and going completely independent and distributing through the internet. As soon as they start doing that the cable companies will stop paying for their shows, and then at best there will be a long period of time while people switch over to consuming everything over the internet. Imagine how long it's going to take IE8 to disappear due to the fact that you can't upgrade to IE9+ w/o Vista+. Now imagine the upgrade I have to do is swapping out a cable box for a computer. Will you survive that gap, or will cable companies, wanting to continue to capitalize on the networks they've built, simply replace your content with someone else's?