"Freaky Gym Tales" and "Wild, Sexy Brunettes" are headed to millions of American cable boxes, courtesy of Ma Bell.
AT&T Corp. is planning over the next month to make available to its 2 million digital cable subscribers the Hot Network, a pay network that has spiced up adult entertainment on cable and satellite television with a much more explicit brand of adult entertainment.
AT&T is among a growing list of some of America's biggest corporate names that have built high-speed fiber-optic networks offering cable television, phone and Internet services, and are using the networks to meet one of the strongest demands in media: for pornography, the more graphic the better.
Cable TV providers have offered adult movies on a pay-per-view basis for more than a decade, but heightened competition and new digital technologies are encouraging many companies to provide programming that stops just short of hard-core pornography.
The adult category amounts to more than 15% of the nearly $2 billion pay-per-view television market and is growing fast. The highly profitable business is creating strange bedfellows between the telecommunications and skin industries.
The adult movie niche has quietly become the dominant pay-per-view revenue stream, said Ted Henderson, a media analyst with Janco Partners Inc. in Denver. Despite its success, nobody wants to talk about the adult category, Henderson said. "Obviously, the cable industry doesn't want to promote it because it's relatively embarrassing."
In addition to AT&T, other companies providing more explicit movies are DirecTV Inc., a satellite television subsidiary of Hughes Electronics Corp., and Starpower Communications Inc., a cable service that is a joint venture of Potomac Electric Power Co. and RCN Corp., a New Jersey telecom company.
It remains to be seen whether other major cable companies will follow. The biggest holdout is Time Warner Inc., which says the Hot Network programming goes too far. Time Warner does, however, offer Playboy's tamer programming on a pay-per-view basis.
But in markets in which Hot Network and the softer Playboy TV are available, the more explicit channel outsells Playboy 2 to 1.
The corporate move into the more raw adult entertainment has its roots in the late 1990s, when these companies decided to secure a stake in the Digital Age by building fiber-optic networks that could serve as a one-stop conduit for cable, Internet and telephone service. Now these companies are competing on a household-by-household basis for subscribers willing to pay for the high-end amenities provided by digital cable, such as crystal-clear pictures and CD-quality sound.
