Wrong.

Like many multinationals, HBO underestimated how much it would have to adapt in Asia. Cable companies in most Asian countries don't pay HBO very much per subscriber, and some even steal its signal. Only Hong Kong, Singapore and several other small countries have the little TV set-top boxes that let cable companies charge extra for premium channels like HBO and block them unless customers pay up. After eight years and only six million subscribers, or a sixth of the 36 million subscribers HBO and its sister channel Cinemax have in the US, HBO Asia says the two channels are just marginally profitable in its territory.

And that's not counting the cultural problems: Try showing US movies on television in two dozen countries from Malaysia to Mongolia. Every month, HBO has to edit as many as 18 new movies to conform to Asia's conservative sensibilities. Most require only a snip or two, but occasionally one needs major surgery.

On an afternoon not long ago in a cramped editing room in HBO Asia's Singapore headquarters, two technicians pore over a fax from Singapore's cable company. It contains a list of 23 cuts the company wants before it will air the BBC documentary "Waiting for Harvey" on Cinemax. The movie is about four filmmakers at the Cannes Film Festival who want movie mogul Harvey Weinstein to buy their films. It ran uncut in the US, where HBO doesn't censor movies. But Singapore is demanding the naughtiest word in the English language, uttered frequently by the filmmakers, be excised. It also wants an upraised middle finger furled.

And Singapore is more liberal than neighbouring Malaysia, where women can be fined for not covering their heads in public with scarves and where censors usually demand the most cuts of anyplace in Asia. "If you want to find out really quick what happens at the end of a movie," says HBO Vice President Vincent Teo, "watch the Malaysian version."

So, of all the countries in Asia, conservative, Muslim Malaysia most often gets its very own customized broadcast. In November, the Malaysian cable company that carries HBO banned the R-rated 1997 historical epic "Amistad," about a slave revolt in the US, because the slaves are naked in some scenes. The movie's director, Steven Spielberg, doesn't allow his movies to be cut, so "Amistad" never made it to Malaysia. Because of another flash of nudity in Mr Spielberg's Holocaust drama "Schindler's List," Malaysians never saw that, either.

Malaysia also refused to show "Mobsters," a 1991 movie with Christian Slater playing legendary 1930s American gangster boss Lucky Luciano as a young man, not only because of what the local cable company called its "merciless violence" but also because it supposedly glorified criminals. "Fever Lake" and "Twists of Terror," gory horror movies from the 1990s, got two thumbs down for the obvious reasons.

The rest of the countries served by HBO in Asia see a channel censored to conform to the standards of Singapore, a tiny nation of 3.2 million with a reputation for prudishness. (Singapore is starting to lighten up, however; the Board of Film Censors relented recently on changing the title of the Time Warner movie "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" to "The Spy Who Shioked Me," the verb being a milder Singapore slang word for a less intense experience.)

Farther north in Asia, in places such as Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, HBO Asia's largest market, there is less demand for censorship. But Southeast Asia is a minefield. Here, the cable and satellite companies that carry HBO demand cuts based on government regulations, which vary widely by country. Thailand, despite its notoriously open sex industry, is fairly sensitive about movies on TV, although it is still more liberal than Singapore. You can, for instance, use the "f" word on cable TV in Thailand.

All this is a hassle for HBO, which, after all, is selling stuff you supposedly can't see on regular TV. Unlike in the US, where HBO is a large -- with an estimated $2.2 billion in revenue last year -- and very profitable unit of giant media conglomerate Time Warner Inc., HBO Asia is a small venture. Time Warner owns 40 percent; three film studios own the rest: Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures Corp., Sony Corp.'s Columbia/TriStar studios and Seagram Co.'s Universal Studios Inc. (Besides a share of the cable channel's profit, each participating studio is paid by the venture for the movies it contributes.)

HBO tries to edit as subtly as possible. During, say, a sex scene, HBO's technicians can pan away to another part of the frame so the music or ambient sounds don't stutter. Often, viewers don't even notice the change. "I run into Americans at cocktail parties here who say 'I'm surprised you could show that uncut,' " says Mr Perryman, the senior vice president of programming and promotion.

Censorship isn't the only hassle. Just writing grammatical subtitles in Chinese, Thai and Indonesian can be a problem. HBO employs four people in Singapore to check the translations. One recent catch: A character turns to another at a bar and says "Bottoms up." Instead of "Drink up," it came back in Indonesian as "Let's turn these glasses upside down."

Sometimes a country will surprise the Americans at HBO. "Sex and the City," a half-hour comedy about New York career women discussing and having a great deal of sex, is banned in Singapore, and HBO will have to find something to fill 18 half-hour holes in its Singapore broadcast this year. But Malaysia is taking the show, albeit heavily edited.

Back in the editing room, Mr Teo watches as the two technicians use computers to electronically snip the offending words from "Waiting for Harvey." Often, an edited version of a movie is already available, having been rerecorded for screening on airplanes or US broadcast TV. Typically, the actors simply record substitute phrases, such as "I'm 'finally' going to kill you!" for the "f" word. Then HBO editors will painstakingly graft these bits onto their own version.

But there is no alternative version of "Waiting for Harvey," so the technicians are simply cutting the offending words, at the risk of the occasional out-of-sync "lip flap" when an actor speaks.

Still, this is a relatively easy edit. The record: More than 300 cuts, to "Casino," the 1995 movie about Las Vegas gamblers in which Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone toss a great deal of bad language back and forth. It took five days.