Adult video on demand has long been a hotel room entertainment staple, but new data suggests there may be a more alluring alternative for the hospitality industry. A study by the company Enseo suggests that Netflix, when available as a replacement, is much more popular than porn.
The study found that hotel guests order Netflix at a rate 40 times higher than they do adult video on demand, Variety reports. Without a Netflix option, 1 percent of occupied hotel rooms will pay to order adult entertainment on any given day, Enseo finds. However, when Netflix is an option instead, an average of 40 percent of rooms opt to watch the streamer’s content.
With that data in mind, Enseo CEO Vanessa Ogle told Variety that hotels should offer Netflix instead of porn. On top of the fact that more people will watch Netflix in their hotel rooms, the company says that they will do so longer than they would other in-room entertainment offerings. Enseo finds that room occupants will watch an average of 90 minutes on the streamer compared to 14 minutes of news or sports. It is unclear how long their porn-viewing sessions typically last.
Of those who do choose to watch porn, plenty are apparently happy to do so in their rooms, only to later dispute the charge when it comes time to pay for it at the front desk.
“Hotels are losing money on VOD,” Ogle told Variety.
It bears mentioning that Enseo develops technology that brings Netflix into hotel rooms. The company partnered with the streaming service so it could offer a Netflix app that is available in more than 100,000 hotel rooms worldwide. Guests are able to sign into their own accounts and select what they want to watch from the streamer’s catalog.
When it comes to Netflix versus porn, the streaming service does have at least one big advantage: It doesn’t have the same shame factor that adult VOD may have. The stigma attached to adult entertainment could not only explain some of the disputed charges, but may also be responsible for parrt of the massive gap in its popularity compared to Netflix’s. That is not to say that the streamer wouldn’t be more popular than in-room porn even with more anonymity.
Whatever the factors contributing to the disparity, we would not be surprised to see Netflix increasingly pop up in hotels around the world — with or without porn also being an option.
