Once-Conservative Adelphia Adds Hard-Core Porn to Cable

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-adelphia2feb02,0,231308,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Once-Conservative Adelphia Adds Hard-Core Porn to Cable
By Sallie Hofmeister
Times Staff Writer

February 2, 2005

Porn is suddenly sexy to a cable TV company once considered the industry prude.

Adelphia Communications Corp. has quietly become the nation's only leading cable operator to offer the most explicit category of hard-core porn. Come Friday, triple-X-rated programming will be available on cable for the first time in a major media market: Southern California. "People want it, so we are trying to provide it," Adelphia spokeswoman Erica Stull said. "The more Xs, the more popular."

Stull stressed that the programming, supplied by Playboy Enterprises Inc., would not be advertised and could be blocked to prevent children from watching. It will be delivered through video-on-demand technology, available now to about two-thirds of Adelphia's 1.2 million Southern California subscribers. The move is a radical departure for Adelphia, the largest cable provider in Southern California and the nation's fifth biggest. Five years ago, Adelphia stirred a local controversy by dropping Spice — a popular soft-porn channel — from newly acquired cable systems here because Adelphia founder John Rigas considered X-rated programming immoral.

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"The conservative groups that want to clean up the airwaves have forced people looking for racier stuff to pay for it," said Bill Asher, co-chairman of Van Nuys-based Vivid Entertainment, the world's largest producer of adult programming. "It's given pay TV more authority to go further than before."

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Today, analysts say, adult programming gives cable and satellite distributors their highest profit margins. Such suppliers of adult programming as New Frontier Media Inc. and Playboy get from 5% to 15% of the average $9 consumers pay for a movie, according to industry sources. By comparison, distributors typically give Hollywood studios half of the revenue on pay-per-view movies, which usually costs under $5 per rental.

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get your morals here - never used, mint in box morals.

he said the biggest sales of x-rated pay-per-view came when they hosted a christian convention. go figure.