We’re back at the office and wanted to pass along one of the things we spent a little time doing this weekend – investigating a little more into the On Demand movies that we have with our HBO and Showtime cable subscriptions. The number of movies with smoking scenes available at the touch of a button is impressive – right now on HBO on Demand, there’s “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” and “Joe vs. the Volcano” – and on Showtime On Demand (the better of the two this week) there’s “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” “Avenging Angelo,” “Bright Young Things,” “Four Rooms,” and “Havoc.” Not the same as a four-star smoking video, of course, but a nice change of pace for sure

that things are getting touch for producers who periodically have problems with website processing and so on…believe it.
We are currently involved in a battle with PayPal – because the name of our business and our email address, have the word “Smoke” in it. The issue is pressure from processing companies cracking down on the online sale of tobacco products, and so in order to be safe, they are trying to ban any accounts with the word “Smoke” in them.
Just when we thought we had reached a resolution with us, they’ve decided that they want to ban our account because we deal in “adult” products, even though as our customers fully know, we don’t use the PayPal account for the purchase or sale of adult products – and when people ask to pay via PayPal, we refuse. We use the account for personal transactions; our last major transactions were the sale of concert tickets that we couldn’t use, and the purchase of candles.
We don’t know how this battle is going to end up – but we don’t expect it to end well (and our understanding is that when they freeze and then close an account, they confiscate the money that’s IN the account).
But it’s just a message that the anti-smoking climate, which triggered the problem in the first place, is all-pervasive – and when producers have to suspend the sale of memberships or videos because of processing problems, it’s not just an excuse – serving the community these days is simply more difficult than ever – and the witch hunt (trying to close an account not even used for purposes that violate PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy) is just the latest example.