Oceanic Cable is re-branded as Spectrum

A household name for more than 50 years in local cable TV has signed off.

As of today the dominant cable TV system operator in the state has been re-branded as Spectrum, replacing Oceanic, which had served kamaaina customers since the 1960s.

Spectrum is the result of Charter Communications Inc. acquiring Time Warner Cable in a roughly $60 billion deal in May 2016. Charter has been converting Time Warner Cable customers in 28 states to its own service under the Spectrum brand since September, and Hawaii is the last market to undergo the changeover.

As part of the switch, Hawaii customers have the option to keep their existing service packages but also now have new packages to choose from. The Oceanic name, however, wasn’t retained despite a long association in the islands, where a series of mainland companies acquired and maintained the brand.

Oceanic was born as an outgrowth of developing Mililani in the 1960s. At the time, over-the-air TV service wouldn’t reach or wouldn’t be received well in Central Oahu, so Mililani’s developer Castle &Cooke Inc. established its own service initially called Mililani Cablevision.

Castle &Cooke’s real estate development arm, Oceanic Properties, decided to expand the business, and in 1968 announced plans to offer what was then known as cable community antenna television, or CATV, between downtown neighborhoods and Waialae-Kahala. What evolved was Oceanic Cablevision, which acquired competitors and grew to serve most of the state under a succession of different owners and variations of the Oceanic name.

Among those past owners were American Television and Communications Corp., Warner Cable and most recently Time Warner.

Kit Beuret, Oceanic’s director of public affairs from 1982 to 2002, recalled that under Time Warner there was a push to ditch the Oceanic name and streamline operations. Beuret and others at the company here argued against the plan.

“You know how it is with kamaaina businesses,” he said. “We really wanted to hang on to that brand. It was one of the most recognizable brands in Hawaii.”

The argument to keep the Oceanic name was based on the staff, service and products being the same, and that a brand name change would just confuse customers. This reasoning prevailed, and hence Oceanic Time Warner Cable.

While Connecticut-based Charter essentially assumed Oceanic Time Warner’s Hawaii operations, including employees and retail locations, it is offering new serv­ices, including national uniform pricing and internet service with a starting speed of 100 megabits per second with no additional modem fees or data or usage limits.

“At Charter, we are working hard to redefine what a cable company can be and we call it Spectrum,” Tom Rutledge, Charter chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

There are no plans to change existing Hawaii service packages, said company spokesman Dennis Johnson. “We want to make this as smooth a transition as possible,” he said. “Current customers do not need to do anything.”

Local programming will be unchanged, including high school and University of Hawaii sports coverage, he added. UH sports programming will henceforth be known as Spectrum Sports, but the high school sports programming known as OC16 will retain the reference to Oceanic Cable in its new name, Spectrum OC16.