"We take these matters very seriously and will monitor the situation closely," said Richard D. Parsons, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, which owns HBO.
U S West owns 25 percent of Time Warner Entertainment, which also owns Warner Brothers and HBO.
Columbia House is partly owned by Time Warner, which owns HBO and Warner Brothers studio.
Time Warner also owns HBO.
Time Warner, which owns HBO, until recently charged $5 a month for HBO on-demand service on its cable systems and now offers it free.
(Mr. Turner is the vice chairman of Time Warner, which owns HBO.)
The pretax profits included $793 million, the company's share of pretax earnings from its interest in Time Warner Entertainment, which owns Warner Brothers, HBO and cable systems.
U S West owns a 25 percent stake in Time Warner's Warner Brothers studio, cable systems, and HBO.
(There are enough plugs for Time to remind viewers that the magazine is part of the company that owns HBO, which produced the movie.)
"Maybe he thought we were part of the same happy family" at Time Warner, which owns HBO, as Sports Illustrated, a $40 million sponsor of the Olympics.