by Sanford Nowlin, Express-News Business Writer
Time Warner next month will flash caller ID on customers' TV screens when they get a phone call, a sign that the cable company is taking SBC Communications Inc.'s television aspirations seriously.
Time Warner will make the new feature available Oct. 10 to all San Antonio customers who subscribe to both its digital phone and digital cable service. It will be free, and customers have the option of turning it off.
The on-screen caller ID concept is something San Antonio-based SBC has touted as a perk of the video-over-Internet television service it plans to launch in major markets about the end of the year.
"This just shows that where there's competition, the customer wins," said Jeff Kagan, an Atlanta-based telecom analyst. "When you've got the phone company getting into the TV business, you'll see the prices drop and the innovation start to go up."
SBC is spending $4 billion to provide video service over its broadband Internet lines. It hopes to reach 18 million of its customers -- or about half its service area -- by mid-2008.
All along, the company has said it wants the added features made possible by its Internet-based system to be a prime selling point.
San Antonio will be the first of Time Warner's 31 U.S. cable divisions to get on-screen caller ID. The rest will follow over the next two months.
Time Warner officials said they selected San Antonio because it's one of the cable giant's best phone-service markets. Since launching digital phone service here a year ago in competition with SBC, it has signed up more than 50,000 households.
"We think SBC will notice that it's being launched here and in a big way," Time Warner Vice President Jeff Henry said. "This is just the tip of the iceberg."
Time Warner will introduce other high-tech features in coming months, Henry said. Among them is a service that lets customers keep track of their bids on the eBay online auction service via a TV set.
SBC officials said they're not surprised a major competitor wants to introduce perks such as on-screen caller ID as the company gets closer to breaking into the TV business.
But they questioned whether the cable company could duplicate other planned features - from the ability to record a favorite program via cell phone to picking your own camera angle for basketball games.
"Caller ID has been around since the '80s, and the ability to bring it to the screen isn't necessarily new either," SBC spokesman Selim Bingol said. "There are lots of other features of our service that will make it stand apart."
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