Playboy’s New Porn Channels Are Too Spicy For Some
Andrea Figler
Playboy Enterprise’s latest cable offerings may be too sexy for their own good.
Operators are shunning Playboy’s Spice Platinum, a new group of channels with graphic hard-core fare. And satellite providers are unlikely to bite, either, since they already provide racy adult content from Playboy’s former subsidiaries, Hot Network and Hot Zone.
Playboy–which once decided it would get out of the business of airing hard-core movies on cable–announced last year that it would roll out Spice Platinum with porn movies depicting actual penetration rather than just soft-core sex scenes. Likely suppliers include such porn-industry stalwarts as VCA and Wicked Pictures, which already provide content for Playboy’s video-on-demand offerings.
The move was crucial for the Chicago-based company, which has noticed that hard-core porn can generate strong revenues on pay-per-view. Revenues from adult pay-per-view movies rocketed to $465 million last year from $369 million in 1999, partly due to demand for more explicit fare, according to Kagan World Media, the media industry newsletter and data book publisher that, like Cable World, is a subsidiary of Media Central.
Officials announced earlier this month that the channels would be delayed till the summer due to technical difficulties. But some observers wonder if the tepid response from operators may have influenced the delay.
The reaction of Cable One, an operator based in Phoenix, is typical: “We’re concerned about how our customers might respond,” says Gerald McKenna, Cable One’s vice president of strategic marketing. “The programming is awful strong.”
Time Warner Cable doesn’t like the drift toward hard-core, either. “We carry the classic, or standard, adult services, not the new harder-core services,” says spokesman Mike Luftman.
Analysts say this might be bad news for Playboy, which needs to compete aggressively with purveyors of graphic fare on satellite and video. “If they get to fall without a contract, the conclusion is that nobody is going to carry the stuff,” says Dennis McAlpine, a media analyst for Wall Street brokerage firm Auerbach, Pollak & Richardson. But Playboy insists that operators will like the product once they see it.
“Cable operators typically don’t want something until they know it’s there,” says Jim English, Playboy Network’s worldwide president. “We’ll launch it even though we may not have any carriage initially.”
But satellite is really complicating matters for Playboy. DirecTV and EchoStar Communications already carry multiple channels of porn fare.
“We have no plans to add the network at this time,” says Bob Marsocci, spokesman for DirecTV. “We already have five channels of adult programming.”
Two of the explicit adult channels offered by DirecTV are Hot Networks and Hot Zone, which were formerly owned by Playboy. Christie Hefner, Playboy’s chairman and chief executive officer, decided to sell those racier networks to porn purveyor Vivid Entertainment when Playboy acquired another rival, Spice. Hefner sold those off as a way to appease concerns of many operators. Just a few years later, however, strong revenue growth for these channels and similar networks prompted Playboy to create the new explicit channels.
While Playboy still has the option to buy back Hot Networks and Hot Zone from Vivid, it plans to go forward with Spice Platinum sometime this summer. The first channel will be Spice Platinum Live, featuring an undisclosed live and interactive format. English says that Spice Platinum Live received the best response from consumers and operators throughout the past few months. Spice Platinum 1 and Spice Platinum 2, which plan to show more explicit movies, will follow.
All three Spice Platinum Live channels will be included on the video-on-demand service offered through Playboy’s Instant Access VOD product announced in the first quarter of this year, English says. To date, Playboy’s softer porn is being beta tested on this Instant Access platform with Time Warner Cable and video-on-demand aggregator Intertainer, English adds.
When the racier programs come out, Playboy will offer whatever version of adult content on the VOD system is acceptable to the operator. “Whatever the operator wants, we’ll deliver,” he says.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Copyright by Media Central Inc., A PRIMEDIA Company. All rights reserved.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
