TWX after the bell 5-1-06: no love for the family-friendly

Time Warner moved almost not at all today, down only six cents on below-average volume of about 21 million shares. And at $17.34, the stock is smack dab in the middle of the company's very tiny 52-week range (low: $16.10, high: $19.00).

Everyone seems to be in a holding pattern awaiting the earnings release later this week. But that doesn't mean no one cares! Someone always cares about Time Warner. Today, it's the family-friendly lobby, who is up in arms over the new family-friendly packages cable companies, like Time Warner and Comcast are offering - and not marketing enough. They'd rather see a la carte options so each family can decide what, indeed, it deems to be friendly.

As Carlo at Techdirt points out, "Cable companies aren't completely stupid -- if offering a la carte, or spending more to market family tiers would pay off, they'd jump on it." Everyone who's been through a microeconomics course at a good business school has done the problem set where we learn that bundling cable channels maximizes revenue! And what do shareholders want more than maximized revenue? Certainly not cable companies parenting our kids (and choosing, for instance, whether our kids should watch Fox News, or Animal Planet, or neither of the above). Commenters at Techdirt riff on cable monopolies, extortion, and bad parenting but I think none of this matters: shareholders don't give a darn whether or not Time Warner markets family-friendly cable bundles. As long as that revenue stays maximized.