McAllen, Texas cities hire attorney to fight cable company's digital plans
McALLEN – A Washington attorney will represent McAllen and numerous other cities across the state in a fight against Time Warner Cable, the city attorney said Thursday.
Nick Miller, of D.C.-based firm Miller and Van Eaton, helped several Michigan cities fight Comcast in 2008, when the cable company tried to digitize public TV channels.
McAllen and Time Warner have a similar dispute over the company’s plans to digitize public TV channels in Texas.
Those channels include MCN12, McAllen’s government information channel, and Channel 17, used by local schools. Only Time Warner customers will be affected by the move.
Dropping the current analog signals and replacing them with digital signals, which use less bandwidth, would allow Time Warner to offer new services, such as HD channels and faster Internet speeds. But the switch would also force owners of older televisions to install a converter box to decipher the digital signal.
Time Warner has announced it will end the analog transmissions Oct. 1.
“It is a critical health and safety matter,” McAllen warned Time Warner in an Aug. 9 letter, that the public TV channels “be available to all subscribers, without additional subscriber equipment, without additional charges and without any addition burdens.”
Time Warner has promised to give a free converter to all basic-cable customers for five years. Standard-cable customers will receive a free box for one year, but must pay $7.95 per month after that.
Some TVs manufactured before 2005 and all TVs manufactured before 1998 will need a converter, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.
An informal coalition of cities — including Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Waco, Mission, Edinburg and Brownsville — have come out against the plan, said Kevin Pagan, McAllen’s city attorney. McAllen has been leading the group and participated in a teleconference about Time Warner on Wednesday.
Though terms haven’t been worked out, Pagan said he expects McAllen and other cities of more than 25,000 people to pay $2,500 upfront. Smaller cities will pay $1,000 upfront.
Miller will also submit hourly bills, but the cities haven’t worked out how they’ll split the tab.
A Time Warner spokesman called Miller’s hiring a “surprising” move, but said the decision will not affect the company’s Oct. 1 deadline.
“We are doing this for our customers,” said Jon Gary Herrera, Time Warner’s Texas regional vice president for communications. “Our customers have been the priority in this from the very beginning.”
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Dave Hendricks covers McAllen and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4452.
