NEW YORK — Operators of sex-oriented cable TV channels figure the nation's highest court has helped them get into more homes.
Playboy Television, Spice and The Hot Network welcomed a Supreme Court decision Monday that struck down a law forcing many cable operators to restrict sexually oriented material to late-night hours.
The law required cable operators to fully block such programming to nonsubscribers during daylight hours. But since many cable systems lacked the technology to guarantee that the sound and pictures on sexually explicit programs would be completely scrambled, they opted to restrict these networks to airing only between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
"It put carriage of our network in jeopardy in a number of places," said Tony Lynn, president of the Playboy Entertainment Group.
Playboy operates four separate adult-oriented stations, including Playboy Television and Spice. The largest, Playboy TV, is available in 20 million homes, 13 million with cable and the rest with satellite dishes, Lynn said. There are about 100 million television homes in the country, 76 million with cable or satellite dishes.
The law didn't affect what the stations put on the air. However, Playboy TV had to make certain it had programming that started at 10 p.m. in every time zone so no one was joining something in progress, Lynn said.
The ruling won't affect Utah's dominant cable provider, AT&T, which only provides adult programming on pay-per-view channels. "It has to be specifically ordered to be seen," said spokeswoman Barb Shelley, "and our technology is such that you have to confirm four times that you want it."
The adult pay-per-view channels are available only on AT&T's digital programming tier, which also allows subscribers to lock out channels. "It's really just not an issue for us," Shelley said. About 26 million homes — 10 million of them cable — get The Hot Network or The Hot Zones, channels operated by Vivid Entertainment. Bill Asher, company president, said the law caused some cable operators to shy away from his programming.
Partly as a result, Vivid has tried to grow its business among satellite customers or on cable systems with up-to-date, digital technology that could be more effectively scrambled, he said.
"For us, this was a nuisance," Asher said. "We believe the new technology will solve our problems better than the Supreme Court will."
Asher said he expected his competitors at Playboy to see the most immediate benefits from the court decision. Since Playboy airs less explicit material than Vivid's channels, its networks will be more attractive to cable systems that have shied away from the programming, he said.
It was not immediately clear how quickly cable systems that carry these networks would begin showing them outside the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. timeframe.
The decision should also eliminate an oddity that often angered Playboy's Lynn. His company would occasionally sell some of its programming to pay cable competitors like Cinemax or Showtime which, because they were not considered sexually oriented channels, could air the material at any time.
"We always felt that logic was on our side in this battle," Lynn said.