It’s rarely discussed, because polite company doesn’t like to talk about boobies (We’re anything but polite company, apparently), but a major chunk of revenue for the major cable companies has traditionally come from selling porn. Whether it’s overcharging you for the Spice Channel when you could just hit “Previous Channel” over and over again, or buying “adult entertainment” directly from on-demand services, your cable company has been more than happy to sell you dirty movies while pretending not to.
Well, that party’s all but over, at least if the latest data from Time Warner Cable is to be believed.
Unsurprisingly, people are increasingly turning away from the sucky, expensive VOD services offered by their cable provider and turning instead to functional, expensive VOD services like Apple and Amazon, and Time Warner ate a $14 million revenue drop from that part of their business. Unsurprisingly dinged the hardest: adult movies, which was a third of the loss. In a rare case of actual technological awareness, Time Warner admitted that they basically had no way to compete with the terabytes of porn streaming over the Internet, right at your fingertips, for free.
Also, they lost 130,000 subscribers. And yet, by just selling Internet access, they still outperformed their own financial expectations. Can we expect them to learn from this?
Yeah, we don’t think they’ll get it either.