If you live in the LA/Orange County area, you can watch over 30 movies on demand from TWC for only a penny each this weekend, which is awesome except for one small detail: you can’t really watch them. Apparently TWC didn’t anticipate that lots of customers might, you know, want to take advantage of this offer, and demand brought the “on demand” system to its knees almost immediately.
Update: TWC says sorry, offers coupons to affected customers.

Tamara Chuang of the OC Register has been following the non-sale this weekend:

What a mess! For customers trying to take advantage of Time Warner’s 1-cent customer appreciation movie deal, the deluge of requests has apparently taken out the system. Readers are complaining that they cannot access the movies, plus other promised movies (mostly HD) are now missing! As of 11 p.m.[on February 14th], only “Hamlet 2” is available in HD.

If you call Time Warner’s customer support line, at 1-888-TWCABLE, a recording says that it is aware of the video-on-demand issues and engineers are working on it. After 30 minutes on hold myself, a polite customer service representative offered me two coupons for free movies in the future and explained that HD movies were removed because they weren’t coming in clearly (?). She didn’t expect issues to be resolved tonight but was told by her supervisor that we should check the lineup at 8 a.m. on Sunday. The missing HD movies should also be added back.

That 8 a.m. deadline is about 10 minutes away. We’ll see how Sunday’s cheap movie sale works out for TWC customers in SoCal.

“This weekend: Time Warner offers 40 movies for 1-cent each” [Gadgetress at OC Register] (Thanks to Brett!)
“One Cent Movies On Demand” [Time Warner Cable]

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