LOS ANGELES — Time Warner Cable reported this week that its video-on-demand business dropped significantly in the last quarter, attributing much of the slide to the declining sales of adult programming.
CEO Glenn Britt said customers have been getting their porn on the Web for free, according to published reports.
"One of the things going on with VOD is that there’s been fairly steady trends over some time period now for adult to go down, largely because there’s that kind of material available on the Internet for free," Britt said. "And that’s pretty high margin. That’s been not just this quarter, but going on for some time period."
Time Warner CFO Rob Marcus said that adult content is responsible for about a third of the drop in VOD sales, citing the lack of big pay-per-view events such as boxing matches as another factor. The company's total number of video subscribers also decreased during the last quarter, according to reports.