Sad news for people who fondly recall childhood nights spent attempting to watch "scrambled" pornography on high-numbered cable channels, a pastime which has afflicted them with a lifelong wavy-bar fetish: the television porn industry is slowly dying. Which is completely predictable and represents nothing more than the logical progress of technology, but still. We thought you'd like to know, what with your... certain predilections.

Porn sales—channel subscriptions as well as on-demand things—have always been a huge moneymaker for cable companies, and a fun pastime is to bring this fact up persistently during conference calls with them about their quarterly earnings! Alas, they are experiencing shrinkage. Shrinkage shrinkage shrinkage.

On Thursday, satellite provider DirecTV cited "lower adult buys" as a cause for weaker pay-per-view revenue in its second quarter earnings. That followed Time Warner Cable Inc.'s admission last week that shrinkage in the adult category was responsible for more than a third of a $14 million drop in video-on-demand revenue. While only a sliver of the cable company's $4.9 billion in revenue for the quarter, porn is one of TV providers' most profitable segments.

Hi Bob, Sam Schechner from the Wall Street Journal here, thanks for taking my question. Would more Hot Sexxxy Lesbians be a possible solution here? I mean, is this really a sea change for the industry, or could an increase in offerings that take a look at what Wet Wild Insatiable Cheerleaders Really Do in the Locker Room have some positive effects here? Has the situation gotten so bad that it can't even be redeemed by "flooding the zone" with vaginas? Bob? Answer the question.

[WSJ]