Why Is No One Watching Porn On TV Anymore?

By on August 5, 2011 in News 9

[PORN]The TV networks are hurting because their most profitable customers – viewers of pornography – just aren’t watching enough. Sam Schechner and Jessica E. Vascellaro report for the Wall Street Journal:

Cable and satellite television companies have a pornography problem: Their customers aren’t watching enough of it.

Companies’ revenue from highly profitable adult video-on-demand and pay-per-view services has been slipping, as the genre’s consumers spend more time browsing porn on the Web.

The trend is prompting TV executives to pull back the curtain on how porn contributes to their businesses, a topic they have been loath to discuss publicly.

On Thursday, satellite provider DirecTV cited “lower adult buys” as a cause for weaker pay-per-view revenue in its second quarter earnings. That followed Time Warner Cable Inc.’s admission last week that shrinkage in the adult category was responsible for more than a third of a $14 million drop in video-on-demand revenue. While only a sliver of the cable company’s $4.9 billion in revenue for the quarter, porn is one of TV providers’ most profitable segments.

Other cable- and satellite-TV executives say they have been weathering the problem for years. “There’s been a fairly steady trend over some time period now for adult to go down largely because there’s that kind of material available on the Internet for free,” Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable’s CEO, said on a conference call to discuss earnings results last week.

Adult TV’s woes echo broader challenges that the television business is facing from Internet video. Distributors and TV networks, for instance, are talking about restricting next-day Web streaming of TV shows, which some executives believe eats into ratings and makes it easier for television viewers to become “cord-cutters.”

“This should be a cautionary tale for the larger content community,” one cable-TV executive said of the porn declines. “This content is devalued to our customers because of the alternative models.”…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

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  • DeepCough

    Come on, Pay-Per-View, The Playboy and Spice Channel went out with the 90′s.

  • Anonymous

    Why am I not watching porn on television?

    Because all the good Bear porn is online.

  • Dueyv9

    Ah technology….making everything of no value actually have no value. I can find 1000′s of full length movies online for free and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

  • Victoria

    What a dumb question… nobody is watching it on TV any longer because you can get all the porn you could ever want for free online.

  • Hadrian999

    it’s the same reason that some of the big porn producers have been hit hard, the internet has totally changed entertainment distribution, you no longer need the old stuff like physical warehouses, stores, channels, all you need is a website and digital content, everything is changing even though the last generation is trying it’s best to hold on

  • http://en-pi.facebook.com/steward John Deltuvia

    There’s a technological reason, too: there’s a lot of women making good money with *interactive* porn, crafted to the particular viewer.  TV, being a one-way-medium, can’t match that.  The only thing the TV companies can do is set up their own websites to make it easier for displayers and watchers – or both directions – to set up online presences, in exchange for a cut of the revenue.

  • Anonymous

    Here comes television to ruin web videos.Thank you baby boomers for completely missing the point.

  • DiscoEcho

    TV is so passe. I can’t believe businesses like blockbuster were not the first offering online movie rentals, like duh.”Me no business major”, but holy fuck, you could see that one coming a mile away. It’s like oil. Eventually that will be replaced by something else, eventually. We don’t change because we want to. We change because we must. It’s the human way.

  • dexthor xedd

    What is “TV”?