some cases lingerie, non-offensive covers of adult material, etc. may be shown in the shop windows depending on the licence conditions of the local authority. Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act allows the police to seize obscene material under warrant and take it to the nearest magistrate to be destroyed. This is preferred to a trial by police and defendants alike, and seizures are seldom contested. Television The introduction of cable television and satellite television in the UK in the 1990s allowed the development of pornographic television channels. Some channels are free-to-air while others are encrypted part or all of the time. The introduction of encryption allowed a reduction in piracy and the broadcasting of material that would not be permitted on unencrypted television. Nevertheless, a majority of the content broadcast has been softcore pornography to satisfy the regulator Ofcom and it is not permitted to show an erect penis or penetrative sex on television. In January 1992, Home Video Channel started a pornographic television channel called The Adult Channel, a cable- and satellite-delivered subscription service that featured cable-TV versions of adult movies. The Adult Channel was available to approximately 2 million cable households and approximately 4 million Direct-To-Home (DTH) satellite households in the United Kingdom. The channel received a warning from the Independent Television Commission in 1994 for transmitting illegally in unencrypted form. After 1 May 1999 the Adult Channel changed its focus from pornographic films to diverse pornographic content, and was subsequently acquired by Playboy Enterprises. As of 2017 the channel was still in operation. In 1995 two competing pornographic channels were launched. The first was Television X- The Fantasy Channel which was launched by Portland TV (at the time a subsidiary of Northern & Shell) in June 1995. Much of the original programming was developed by Deric Botham, then editor of Penthouse magazine. The company subsequently launched several additional pornographic TV channels. The second pornographic channel to launch in 1995 was Playboy TV UK which started broadcasting in November of that year. Some companies took to broadcasting from other European Union countries in order to take advantage of their less restrictive regulatory regimes regarding sexual content. Red Hot Dutch, TV Erotica and Rendez-Vous all operated in this way in the mid-1990s. Access to the channels was curtailed when the UK Government made it an offence to sell their smart cards in the UK and to advertise