Cleaning Up The '00s. A small, but growing, entrepreneurial niche is finding profits in cleaning up the hot language and other objectionable stuff in videogames and movies, reports Peter Loftus in The Wall Street Journal. One company, called eGames, egames.com, is simply offering wholesome alternatives to "edgy" fare like "Grand Theft Auto," with trivia games such as "Do You Know the Bible?" Rich Siporin, vp of sales and marketing for eGames says most of its line sells "for less than $20" and is intended for "younger children as well as older adults." He comments: "The market was telling us that if parents could buy products and be 100 percent guaranteed that they weren't going to be surprised with the content, they'd be very interested." The company reports its "sales rose 11 percent to $8 million, and profit increased 9 percent, to $1.7 million" versus a year ago.

Another outfit, called Principle Solutions, sells a filter called "TVGuardian, tvguardian.com, which mutes objectionable words in television programming and DVDs by reading the closed-captioning signal for the hearing impaired," that has sold "some 4.5 million units" since 2002 when Sanyo included the filter in at least one of its DVD players. Mike Seals, the company's president, says that the product's "followers has tended to be stronger among the religious than the nonreligious." TVGuardian is advertised mostly on religious radio stations, and has also invested in Mary Lou Retton, the former Olympic Games medalist and mother of four, as its celebrity spokesperson. "We've focused a lot of our efforts in our limited budget on trying to reach mom," says Mr. Seals.

A third comer, known as Clean-Flicks Media, cleanflicks.com, takes things "a step further, producing edited copies of movies for rental and sale that cut" not only "objectionable language" but also the sax and violins. This approach has caused some static in Hollywood -- a lawsuit, actually -- by the Directors Guild of America, "alleging copyright and trademark infringement." Now, of course, "film studios do offer edited versions of films to airlines for in-flight viewing," and have "offered to license these airline versions" to companies like Clean-Flicks. However, "the studios don't make airline versions for every movie" and "their standards are inconsistent," according to Bill Aho, ceo of ClearPlay, clearplay.com, another player in the family-friendly category. Despite the legal wrangling, CleanFlicks ceo Allan Erb sees big things ahead, and plans "to expand marketing in coming months," to "get a better sense of the potential market for family-friendly products."

Tim Manners, editor