Internet Eats Into Time-Warner Cable Porn Profits

Hugh Pickens writes "Big cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable keep saying they don't see Web video cutting into their business, but there's at least one big, dirty exception. Time Warner Cable said in its quarterly earnings report that its video-on-demand (VOD) business dropped significantly in the last quarter. Asked to explain where the drop came from, CEO Glenn Britt came clean, more or less: much of the drop is because, instead of renting a porn video in HD for $9.98, Time Warner's customers are getting their porn fix on the internet for free. 'One of the things going on with VOD is that there's been fairly steady trends over some time period now for adult to go down, largely because there's that kind of material available on the Internet for free,' says Britt. 'And that's pretty high margin.' To be fair, drooping porn rentals don't account for all of Time Warner Cable's VOD decline. Chief Financial Officer Rob Marcus said that while 'the biggest piece of the year-over-year decline was in fact in the adult category,' the rest of the drop is because there weren't many big pay-per-view events like boxing matches last quarter, and because regular movie rentals are down, too."

Porn niches

[zget]

Having worked with the porn industry, it's mostly because cable companies just show that same old pornstar-looking women with silicons doing the same routine over and over again. People are willing to pay for porn but only if it's a niche they really like. This can be japanese, ladyboys, hairy women, old women, celebs and so on.. Yes, you can find these things freely on tube sites on the internet, but if you like something you want to get more of it and then you go find sites offering content that you cannot find for free. But cable companies will never take that in to their content, because they're afraid people will find it weird.

Commodities 101

[Shoten]

"And that's pretty high margin." ...and also, the very definition of something that will eventually lose out to cheaper, lower-margin outlets, unless it maintains some niche specialization. And last I saw, cable companies weren't really "pushing the envelope" on porn.

(Which I think I'm grateful for...some of the descriptions of what's on kind of blow my mind. One channel used to draw my interest just for reading the descriptions. You could tell that the poor soul who was writing the synopses had kind of given up on life...it was hilarious. A movie had the phrase "frankly, defies explanation" in its summary.)