Pay Television

The quest to have you part with $54.95 to see the Pacquiao-Cotto fight Saturday night on HBO pay-per-view was in its homestretch here Wednesday. If this is a tough sell, it is only because slugfests are not high priority in sluggish economies. Or because the stars, Manny Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto, seem to be decent people who speak with respect and are about as controversial as a table napkin. Most boxers are mush-mouths who play smash mouth. These two are courteous, yes-sir and no-sir people.

For years, filmmakers flocked to the Cannes Film Festival to sell their independently financed movies, confident they'd soon see their work exhibited in movie theaters. Like so many show business dreams, those visions have been vanishing quickly as numerous distributors of film-festival fare closed their doors after losing money or corporate support. But there's a potential savior on the horizon called video on demand -- and it may be hiding somewhere inside your cable television box.

The economy is pounding entertainment companies left and right, but Time Warner Inc.'s pay cable channel HBO so far has been immune to the turmoil, its top executives said Thursday. Speaking at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Pasadena, HBO Co-President Richard Plepler said the company's strong DVD sales, along with little evidence of subscribers' dropping the service to save a few bucks, had the network feeling "cautiously optimistic" that it could weather the storm.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. has participated in the two most lucrative boxing pay-per-view shows of the last year, victories against Oscar De La Hoya and Ricky Hatton. As he takes a break before a September rematch with De La Hoya, Mayweather has found another pay-per-view vehicle to boost his celebrity: Wrestlemania 24.

Verizon Communications Inc. won approval Thursday from state regulators to sell TV service in as many as 45 Southern California cities. The approval by the Public Utilities Commission was the first under the state's new video franchising law, which stripped local governments of their jurisdiction over applications to provide pay-TV service and gave it to the PUC. Verizon plans to disclose in a few weeks which cities it will serve first, said Timothy J.

AT&T has given $500,000 to one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's pet causes, six months after the governor signed a law lifting barriers to the company's bid to sell pay television service in California. The money went to After-School All-Stars, a tax-exempt group founded by Schwarzenegger in the early 1990s to provide tutoring, recreation and other programs to poor children.

Moving quickly to cash in on a new state law, Verizon Communications Inc. started offering pay-television service Friday in Long Beach, Huntington Beach and 10 other Southern California cities. The dozen cities, plus unincorporated areas in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino counties, are the first to get paid programming under a law aimed at easing the entry of phone companies into the pay-TV market.

Two companies are introducing technology to thwart people who make illegal copies of video-on-demand and cable television pay-per-view content. Both systems, one from Philips Electronics and another from Cinea Inc., a unit of Dolby Laboratories Inc., insert an invisible digital watermark into the content before it is viewed. The digital fingerprint contains information that would enable a cable TV company to identify the specific subscriber.

And the new pay-per-view champion of the world is Oscar De La Hoya. A record 2.15 million buys for De La Hoya's split-decision loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. on Saturday night on HBO Pay-Per-View generated a record $120 million in revenue. Those numbers, released Wednesday, pushed the totals for 18 pay-per-view fights involving De La Hoya to 12.6 million buys and $612 million in revenue, both record highs. Also, no boxer has ever made as much off one fight.

YOU'VE got another pay television provider that wants your business. But are AT&T Inc.'s upgraded phone lines a smart way to watch TV? The behemoth of phone companies is pushing into a new field, offering video programming in parts of 14 Southern California communities, from Simi Valley to Anaheim to Riverside. And that's just for starters. A mere infant in pay television, AT&T is spending up to $6.