Sex sells. But that doesn't excite the city's largest cable operator, Adelphia Communications, whose conservative rural Pennsylvania owners are taking the moral high ground and dropping sex channels from its systems here. The move is contrary to an industrywide trend by satellite and cable operators to bolster their bottom lines offering highly profitable pay-per-view adult fare.
This fall, Adelphia began dropping the popular Spice channel, neighborhood by neighborhood, from systems that reach from Eagle Rock west to Santa Monica and south to Orange County. The company notified city regulators this summer that it would be replacing Spice with the Health Network.
Adelphia's move is the most sweeping programming change since the firm acquired Century Communications a year ago. The acquisition made Adelphia the region's largest cable operator, with about 1.2 million subscribers in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
The decision is risky, considering that the adult pay-per-view business is soaring. Industrywide, revenues doubled in the last three years to more than $500 million this year, and are expected to accelerate as cable operators expand this segment.
Adelphia would not comment on the change. But industry executives say the patriarch of the Coudersport, Pa., company is morally opposed to what he considers exploitative adult programming that undermines its core family values.
Playboy Television Networks, the owner of two adult brands--Spice and Playboy--that are widely carried over cable and satellite TV, said Adelphia is the only one of the nation's major pay TV providers with a policy against sexually explicit fare.
"It has been their long-term policy to be anti-adult," said Jim English, the president of Playboy Television Networks, which is based in Los Angeles. "The only answer I have for consumers is satellite."
Some industry analysts wonder if the move will hurt Adelphia's competitive battle against satellite services, which have used sex as a selling point and generally devote more channels to the genre than their cable counterparts.
Satellite providers DirecTV and the Dish Network have a wider array of adult offerings, including harder-core fare such as the Hot Network, owned by Van Nuys-based Vivid Entertainment Group, and Pleasure and the Erotic Network, owned by New Frontier Media of Boulder, Colo.
Leading cable operators Time Warner and Comcast have refused to carry these channels because they are far more explicit than Playboy or Spice.
