Bangkok Haunts

20,000 adult sex videos from one satellite programmer alone in the period that Mr. Peterman was said to have broken the law; it was double the volume in most cities the size of Provo. And in the Provo Marriott, guests were paying for nearly 3,000 explicit adult videos every year, according to court testimony. After the Peterman trial, that hotel dropped its adult movies.
    “My client was just a little guy,” Mr. Spencer said, “a mom-and-pop dealer in a very big business.”
     
    The Corporate Factor
    It’s the Demand, Companies Say
     
    At a time when political campaigns from the presidential level down to that of the local school board have made an issue of sexual excess in broadcasting, the corporate entanglements in the pornography business have blurred the lines of the debate.
    In Missouri this year, Senator John Ashcroft, a Republican, ran ads denouncing “Hollywood’s decaying influence” on society, singling out his Democratic opponent, Gov. Mel Carnahan, for accepting donations from Christie Hefner, the Playboy executive.
    Mr. Carnahan, who died last week in a plane crash, had countered by pointing to donations to Mr. Ashcroft from Charles W. Ergen, chief executive of EchoStar, which sells adult pay-per-view through its fast-growing DishNetwork satellite division.
    “If he’s going to start that, he’s in greater trouble than I am,” Mr. Carnahan had said.
    Mr. Ashcroft’s supporters had replied that there was still a distinction between the two companies: EchoStar did not produce pornography—it merely sold it, while Playboy created its own videos and pictures, they said.
    “We added adult at the request of our customers,” said Judiann Atencio, a spokeswoman for EchoStar. “We have something for everybody, from Irish hurling to cricket. Adult is there if you want it.”
    When AT&T announced that it would start offering the hard-core Hot Network to its 2.2 million digital cable subscribers beginning in August, they were castigated by critics and pressured by religious and civic groups that hold stock in the company.
    A group of mutual-fund investors, which included the Sisters of Charity of New York, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the Mennonite Church, told AT&T its members did not want their three million shares invested in a company that sold pornography.
    “At the heart of our concern is the concept of mainstream companies getting into hard-core pornography,” said Mark Regier, who manages a mutual fund for 800,000 members of the Mennonite faith. “For a company with AT&T’s tradition and its charitable work to be involved with pornography at this level is unbelievable. And I don’t think many people understand what it means to take away the barriers to this kind of material, such as AT&T is doing.”
    For AT&T, there are sound business reasons to start carrying the highly profitable Hot Network. Unlike distributors of mainstream Hollywood pictures, sex-film distributors typically offer the programmers a split of 80 percent of the revenue, compared with 50 percent or less for routine features.
    Impulse buys, in which customers tap a code into a remote and a movie follows, have also spurred in-home sales of pornographic films.
    “Impulse technology—that’s been just incredible,” said Mr. Asher of Vivid Entertainment, which makes hundreds of adult films and claims that it sells a million copies a month to cable, satellite, home video and hotel retailers. “You have about 35 million homes with this kind of technology now,” Mr. Asher said, “and it’s growing enormously. It’s easy and it’s private—that’s the key.”
    Although the companies that program explicit sex films will not give out their revenue figures for this category, a report by the Show-time Event Television company found that adult pay-per-view took in $367 million last year—a more than sixfold increase from the $54 million of 1993, easily outpacing the growth of pay-per-view “events” like boxing and wrestling.
    Time Warner, EchoStar, General Motors and AT&T all say they are simply responding to a growing American market that wants pornography in the home. At the same time, the companies say new technology makes it possible for parents to keep such programming away from children.
    “We call it choice and control,” said Tracy Hollingsworth, a spokeswoman for AT&T Broadband, the company’s cable division. “Basically, you use your remote to block out any programming you don’t