According to its website, EPB is a non-profit agency of the City of Chattanooga, established in 1935 to provide electric power to the greater Chattanooga area; and is one of the largest publicly owned providers of electric power in the U.S.
The utility is under fire from critics who object to what they see as the government getting into the pornography business.
"The government simply should not offer pornography stations on cable networks they own," David Fowler of the Family Action Council of Tennessee said. "The government should not be more interested in making money than they are in disseminating material that has destroyed so many lives and families."
For its part, EPB is responsibly exercising its 1st Amendment obligations: providing local customers with the choices they demand while offering a variety of parental control tools to limit access by minors.
"The case law is pretty clear that any state authority who is involved in providing cable TV service shall not edit any content that is provided over the network," EPB VP of legal services, Aaron Webb, said.
According to EPB Vice President Katie Espeseth, the utility's programming options are an issue of community standards and consumer choice and EPB is simply providing its customers with the channels they want — not unlike cable providers including Comcast (and soon AT&T), which currently offer adult television programming and PPV channels in the Chattanooga market.
"Our decision to offer Playboy was really tied to our overall philosophy of offering more options and choices for customers," Espeseth said. "We do want to give people the freedom to view what they want in their own homes, but behind that we think we've given people some pretty unusual tools to help them manage what they can see and can't see."