There's a buzz beginning about TLA's slow pay/no pay of several studios, and the company has missed royalty payments to studios in its VOD program; a no-no in the online world. AEBN and National A-1 have both made prompt payment a standard feature of their programs.

The juggernaut in gay, mainstream and porn DVDs appears to have some significant cash flow issues, may be

suffering significantly from the economic slow down, and the growth of other videos options from On-Demand cable to Tube sites. TLA was slow to enter the VOD market, and the company is competing against a diverse range of competitors from Netflix to Amazon, to gay porn studios themselves.

TLA has a long and rich history starting as a theater group in Philadelphia. The company is partially gay owned and has always been associated with gay indie film scene, which brought incredible gay street cred but not a lot of profit.

There can be little doubt the gay porn is what really powered the TLA engine over the last 10 years, providing the margins that made up for low profits with selling Hollywood DVDs, and competing against Target and Wal-Mart.

So what's happening that the TLA business model may be weakening? TLA as a DVD retailer has specialized in high-budget star-driven vehicles from Raging Stallion, Chi-Chi, Titan and Falcon. TLA and its suppliers tend to value the packaging over the content. Many of the people selling to TLA don't actually watch the movies and so they can't communicate much more than what the packaging says.

On the other side of the content equation, TLA's bareback ban excluded companies such as Treasure Island and SX Video, out of deference for TLA's activities in the gay community, and it's support for HIV/Aids causes. However, when it came the VOD side of the business, TLA didn't let ceremony stand in the way of jumping in bed with every bareback company they could find.

But in terms of what they did sell, it's quite possible that they they simply exhausted the market, and the market is moving on to a different kind of porn. The big budget movie sank Raging Stallion, and the same kind of trouble may be visiting TLA.

To the Last Man is as much a TLA product as it is Raging Stallion. Let me ask you, have you seen this dreck? Models so bored -- or cracked -- out of their minds they could be having sex with a blow-up doll. Zero passion, minimal heat, and dull, dull, dull. This is what TLA calls quality? No, it's not quality. It's porn by the pound in a pretty package.

TLA always had an upscale clientele. The type of people who read the New York Times Magazine. Guys who could drop $500 on a porn order and not bat an eye. But a lot of those guys want bareback, or have computers and use them, or they're hurtin on their investments.

TLA is a long established company with a strong client base, but they must find a way to survive in the choppy seas of the new video environment, where customers can choose from tube sites to paysites to digital cable. There's a myriad of choices for any consumer, but as always it's about satisfying the customer, and whatever container the product comes in, it really does matter what's inside.