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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."
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Hard to compete with free, but offer content and convenience at an attractive price and people will buy. Admit to ripping them off ("pretty high margin") and they are less likely to do so.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The problem isn't porn. It's the quality of TV. There has been a steady decline in the quality of television since the 80s. As if 80s TV was great to begin with. Free Internet porn has been around for about a decade, but Sy-Fi (pronounced sy-phi-lus) has only been around for a little while. Watching people in cooking, renovating, buying real-estate, singing and dance competitions eliminate each other off the "reality" tv landscape as they act like selfish twats is getting old just as "talk shows" like Jerry Springer did once the shock factor wore off. Not to mention the stupid reality TV shows that follow around self-proclaim no-talent know-nothing bimbo "stars" like the Krapdashians So you cable execs need to take a bit of responsibility for your own stupidity in creating and buying bad TV instead of trying to blame people who already have their hand on their genitals and are openly admitting it by watching your crappy porn. You know you have trouble when you've managed to alienate even seasoned wankers!
Anyway who seriously needs or wants HD at $10 a pop to get aroused? Sometimes less detail is better. ASCII porn was popular back in the day and I remember idiotic strip poker on the Apple IIe back in the early 80s. But I guess having an imagination is so yesterday.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The problem isn't porn. It's the quality of TV. There has been a steady decline in the quality of television since the 80s. As if 80s TV was great to begin with
I don't agree with that., but that's just my personal opinion.
Sure, TV is still filled with tons of trash. We have more "Reality TV" and the music channels (like MTV) don't do much anymore, we stil have tons of Soap Operas an your basic sitcoms.
But some TV-shows have evolved, since just about all TV in the 80's were directed at the whole family (youngsters included) while now we the separate out the shows for adults, kids, etc.
Crime Shows / Mysteries
Crime shows are darker and grittier with more mature content; less fantasy, more reality. Instead of them walking into a room with a body under a sheet and the main character saying "they went to town on her" now they're allowed to say specifically what happened like "due to vaginal tearing we can tell she was raped" and include some science and forensics in the investigation. IE, talking about something new or interesting in forensics (and thus teach something) instead of Columbo picking up a blonde hair with his bare hands and saying "Aha."
They also try to be realistic; now-a-days our cop shows try to be very realistic, at least compared to Starsky and Hutch or TJ Hooker.
Meanwhile the motive also tend to be more varied since they're allowed to cover more sensitive areas. Sure, the motives still revolve around money / love / revenge but due to the "standards" of the 80s they could only say or do so many things. Now it can be "they assaulted my daughter" or "my wife gave me AIDS" or "my husband left me for another man."
Sure, Jessica from "Murder She Wrote" and Columbo were charismatic and all-around good... but so are characters like Adrian Monk, Elliot Stabler, Shawn Spencer, etc. And most of them demonstrate more personality than some of the old TV characters. Face it, Jessica was nice but was otherwise a plain/vanilla polite older woman.
Adventure / Heroes / SciFi
Compare the first season of Heroes with the $6million Man or the Bionic Woman. Special effects aside, there is a LOT more complexity in the newer shows than those old hits. The characters are dealing with more personal demons or concepts, instead of the Bionic Woman having 1 or 2 episodes where she was depressed about not being a real woman anymore.
The recent Battlestar Galactica wasn't everyone's cup of tea. But go back and watch the original, seriously go and watch a marathon. It was the same 3 or 4 flight sequences shown over and over, it was VERY family oriented and/or directed to 7-year-olds. There was little/no realistic reaction to being the survivors of a holocaust. And the science fiction elements were quite rare. With the remake we got more cerebral discussions on politics, philosophy, and emotion. AND we got more in-depth science fiction descriptions and discussions: AI, FTL, how this widget works, etc.
Star Trek: granted the original series was the 60s and not the 80s. But in the original we didn't get much explanation for the events going on, just the occasional strange alien that had a weird ability. Did we learn how their FTL work, no just that it required dilithium crystals. The Next Generation / DS9 / Voyager really put the sci-fi elements to shame. We got real-life theories on how stuff might work, some real biology terms, and some fake techno-babble.
Catoons
And don't get me started on cartoons. Try watching some 80's era Transformers, GI Joe, Smurfs, etc. Taking off the rose-colored glasses and you'll see they were lame... even for the targetted age-groups. Now watch one of the DCAU cartoons (Justice League, Batman TAS, etc), or Young Justice, or Generator Rex, or heck even the Thundercats or Transformers revivals going on now. More mature, more cerebral, better animation, etc. Sure there's still Sponge Bob and Adventure Time but they try to make things more complex
In my experience. religious nuts are the best customers for porn. First, they're happy with even the blurriest, crappiest kind of "Sally does Houston" movie because they're happy with anything that comes remotely to sex. And even if they don't like it, they'd rather swallow the money they lost than admitting they watch porn. Plus, lacking any other kind of "stimulation", they need lots of it.
Yes, religious nuts are certainly the best customers you could probably have as a porn producer. Why do you think the countries with the biggest number of religious nuts also have some of the biggest porn industries?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.