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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."
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.
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I'd have expected this to be news 5-10 years ago. I'd say if they're only taking a hit from the Internet now, they should consider themselves lucky!
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"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.)
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The juxtaposition of "eats into" and "porn".
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
... there's been fairly steady trends over some time period now for adult to go down ...
Well, yes.
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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.
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As pay-for-tv companies start to see their video revenues decline, be ready for the severe data caps that will follow.
Cable and Telcos will fight to the death to keep from becoming dumb pipe providers, and thanks to our lack of net neutrality laws, or any sort of real competition in data services, they might succeed.
-ted
... I can tell you there is a lot of porn available for VOD. Often when I use the directory to search for shows by names, I end up with results porn results coming back when I am typing in the name of the show I am looking for.
I will say from reading the descriptions that they do a fairly good job of covering the various generic fetishes, too. Any ethnicity you can imagine wanting to watch do whatever you might want, it's there...
Although I can't imagine wanting to pay my cable company to watch that, even considering the fact that the cable bill comes out of my checking account automatically without a printed bill ever mailed to my house...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Seriously, every single person I know who subscribes to their services does so either because they have no other choice or because they were told by the landlord when they moved in that they had no other choice. Not a single one of them would keep the service if they had any other choice for cable.
While its an interesting theory that it is the internet that is causing the decline in Time Warner's revenue, and it is true that I know people who finally have gotten so fed up with them that they have decided to just use Hulu, Youtube and Netflix as their "TV service" instead, I honestly don't see that as even remotely reasonable evidence that the fault here lies with the internet. It seems pretty clear to me that what is eating into Time Warner's revenue is the shitty quality of their service across the board, from price to support to reliability it is just unacceptable, and always has been. People finally learning that? Boo-hoo, Time Warner. Maybe you guys should sack up and start caring about uptime, channel selection and customer service.
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
People like me who, 2.5 years ago, said FU big cable companies and pulled the plug completely. There is plenty to see in full bandwidth HD over the airwaves (as opposed to compressed to hell and back before the cable company send it down my wire). All I miss is ESPN. TNT would be nice during the NBA playoffs. All in all I save $100/month (at least) and still see most NFL games I want.
ESPN should set up local OTA affiliates, I'd pay $10/month. Besides that I won't pay for any television.
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.
All my porn consists of a 5 minute video, that I play over and over again... no need for more than that, it gets the JOB done..
Have you ever tried Cheggit.net ? It's pretty good, or so I hear from my deviant friends :-).
I think people actually prefer not paying for porn to avoid the paper trail. It's silly but it's still stigmatized.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Dropping the price would not increase sales that much: most people not already paying for porn wouldn't pay for it if it were cheaper either because they don't want it on a credit card or cable account bill (where others, like the wife, could find it) or in the case of cable because watching it via cable isn't as easy to do quite as surreptitiously.
So the price of a porn flick doesn't drop due to demand numbers like a big hollywood film would.
That, and there is the "what the market will bare" thing. The current price is where they would see a noticeable drop-off in sales were it any higher, or the extra sales would not be enough to make up for the difference if they made it lower.
I don't think I've every paid for porn unless you count using the Internet connection that I do pay for as indirectly paying for it, or if you count getting a beating for stealing my elder brother's stash (in earlier life) as payment. $2 or $10 makes no odds to me: I'll not pay anyway.
That's what she WANTED you to think. In reality, she was the most diabolical sociopath to ever live, able to murder dozens of people and not only pin the crime on others but usually get them to CONFESS to it! How else can you explain a writer "stumbling" into so many murders?
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Are there wives out there that don't know they have husbands watching porn? Here's a clue for them. If they have a boyfriend or husband he watches porn at least occasionally. There are no exceptions. If they think their guy isn't like the rest and is somehow special, they are naive and wrong. Men are hard wired for this stuff, just because they watch porn doesn't mean they don't love their mate.
The last time I paid for pr0n, (needed supplementary materials for my brother's bachelor party,) I made the mistake of paying with a credit card. Within a week, I was receiving rather graphic advertisements in the mail from all manner of adult material suppliers. Apparently I had been classified as "a live one," and every money-grubbing distributor was out to get a cut of the action. It actually felt a bit desperate, honestly, as there were many teaser introductory offers just to get me on the hook. Being single at the time, I really can't say I objected to the additional reading material. However, that was pre-wife and pre-kids. Now, I really don't want the kids retrieving the mail, asking what the white envelope labeled "Up Your Ass Productions" contains.
Selling my purchasing info to *anyone* is a mistake, regardless of the industry, and it pretty much guarantees that you'll lose my future business. Maybe the stats favor the immediate gain over the future "maybe" business, but it changes my "maybe" into a solid "no." I just don't see the folks in the pr0n business having the discipline to pass up the quick buck for a stable business model. So I don't give them my money (i.e. I don't reward bad behavior.) I don't want the follow-up push in this case, and it has nothing to do with social stigma.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680-porn-in-the-usa-conservatives-are-biggest-consumers.html
I'm curious what you thought the relation was.