ALaCarteCable posts

Feed

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

comcast parenting my childTime 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.

Symbol Lookup
IndexesChangePrice
DJIA-38.7112,491.04
NASDAQ-1.432,837.95
S&P 500-0.161,320.52

Last updated: May 25, 2012: 12:29 PM

Hot Stocks

General Electric

19.250.00(0.00)

Alcoa

8.615-0.015(-0.17)

Apple Inc

559.30-6.02(-1.06)

Google Inc 'A'

590.01-13.65(-2.26)

Bank of America

7.185+0.045(+0.63)

Wal-Mart Stores

65.33+0.26(+0.40)

Exxon Mobil Corp

82.34-0.27(-0.33)

Ford

10.615+0.025(+0.24)

Citigroup

26.68+0.02(+0.08)

IBM

194.60-1.49(-0.76)

Yahoo

15.350.00(0.00)

Starbucks

54.56-0.20(-0.37)

Microsoft

29.15+0.08(+0.28)

Home Depot

49.55-0.16(-0.32)

DailyFinance Headlines

AOL Business News

BioHealth Investor Headlines

Sponsored Links

My Portfolios

Track your stocks here!

Find out why more people track their portfolios on AOL Money & Finance then anywhere else.

BloggingStocks Partners

More from AOL Money & Finance

Page Loaded in 1337963356951 ms.