Time Warner to drop select west coast movie channel feeds

In a move that has the hopefuls among us crossing our fingers for more HD, Time Warner is shifting and consolidating a few channels in our local lineup.

As of May 29th, Time Warner Cable's (Northeast) Wisconsin division will be discontinuing the west coast feeds of The Movie Channel (TMC), TMC Extra, SHO Beyond, SHO Next, SHO Family, and SHO Women.  Worry not, though... the east coast feeds aren't going anywhere.  Time Warner and many other cable operators have traditionally offered both east and west coast feeds of their premium movie channel offerings.  But with more and more HD channels squeezing into cable systems nationwide, some cable companies are dropping duplicate premium feeds to free up space.

HBO and Cinemax duplicate feeds don't appear to be in crosshairs at the moment.  I wouldn't get too attached to them, though, if you get my drift.  There's a lot of them, and that's premium real estate (no pun intended).

Also on the Time Warner docket, according to channel notifications posted on their website, the Time Warner info channel now located at channel 72 will be going away as of May 14th.  This will, no doubt, be sad news to the one, maybe two, of you out there crazy enough to DVR those digital phone commercials.

In "on demand" news, those incarnations of Golf and Speed Channel will be folded into "Sports On Demand" on channel 1104 on May 30th.  This follows many other channels whose on demand programming has been tucked neatly into such broad channel headings as "Entertainment On Demand" and "Lifestyle on Demand."