Soft-Core Porn Rules Premium Cable

Some things are certain: death, taxes, and Cinemax showing women with their shoes on having sex late at night. Soft-core porn is "in our DNA," an exec with the parent company of "Skinemax" tells the LA Times. "We're not running away from it." Neither are its premium-cable competitors, which are hardly relegating racier content to late night. Consider HBO's True Blood and Showtime's explicit Californication.

Scheduled episodes of series and films draw solid ratings, but the real money is in pay-per-view and video on demand. Soft-core porn "just keeps going, like a cockroach—you can't kill it," says the founder of a prolific production company. "There's nothing creative about this—you're going to see sex in the first minute and you're going to see sex every seven or eight minutes after that."
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