If Time Warner Cable customers wanted an apology for problems they’ve endured for months with their new channel guide and digital video recorder software, they got one Monday from Beth Scarborough, president of Time Warner Cable Nebraska.

“Nobody’s sleeping very well at night around Time Warner,” she said. “I do think we deserve to be called to task… and I would like to take this opportunity to personally apologize to anyone we’ve disappointed.”

Her repeated apologies were in response to legislation introduced Monday by Councilman Jonathan Cook calling for an unusual performance evaluation of Time Warner by a cable advisory board and an investigation into the problems.

Time Warner has been under fire in Lincoln and elsewhere since it dropped its old Passport channel guide last year and switched to a company-created guide called Navigator — software that allows customers to get programming information and is the interface for video on demand and DVRs.

In addition to Lincoln, the new channel guide was rolled out early in Charlotte, N.C., Milwaukee, and Kansas City, Mo. The change affected about 46,000 digital cable subscribers in southeast Nebraska, including about 35,000 in Lincoln.

Time Warner has fielded about 5,500 complaints since August and has issued credits, such as free premium channels, to half of them.

Scarborough said a performance evaluation would be an overreaction, but that didn’t deter the City Council, which voted to proceed with a review by a vote of 4-3.

The advisory board could recommend Time Warner offer refunds or credits to customers.

Scarborough asked for more time to work out the bugs in the system, and instead suggested a more informal review. She was disturbed by allegations that the company doesn’t care about the problems.

“I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth,” she said.

People are mistaken if they think Lincoln was considered “some small backwater” that could be used as a “small beta test market.”

She said Time Warner switched to its own software so it could eventually provide customers with more features such as a “start over,” “look back” and caller ID function.

She said complaints had dropped since a recent software upgrade. But during the meeting, she heard more as Time Warner customers recounted repeated rebooting and hours without service. One called the software “Laughigator.”

“It was like going from a brand new Mercedes Benz to an old Ford,” Harley Horton said of the switch from Passport to Navigator. “It’s like going from a roadrunner to a snail.”

And yet he’s still paying full price for cable.

“They haven’t screwed that up,” he said. “They’re doing a very good job of making sure they take the money out of my account every month.”

Will Kerns, who said he tests software for companies, said customers deserve to be compensated when they pay full price for a product that’s not 100 percent effective.

“Navigator was a complete debacle from the time we got it,” he said. “It doesn’t work, period.”

And Councilman Cook hammered Time Warner for making excuses, taking advantage of customers by making them pay for an “inferior product” and raising rates in January.

“The expectations are now so low that Time Warner thinks that people should be happy if they don’t have to unplug their cable boxes twice a day,” he said. “Any competent programmer would be embarrassed to be associated with it.”

His resolution was opposed by Republicans on the council who argued that this is a private matter and that Time Warner should be given more time to work through the problems.

Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.