The pornography industry has always been a stimulating innovator, especially when it comes to things like technology and the internet. The estimate on how much revenue Internet pornography makes is somewhere between the 2.5 billion and 12 billion dollars a year mark. But i think its probably more. There are even those that argue that if it wasnt for porn, the internet would not be what it is today (porn being one of the first industries to take advantage of the bandwidth in the early 90’s).

Rob Enderle, a tech industry analyst, said that technology and pornography have an interdependent relationship that tech pundits don’t often acknowledge.

“So much of the technology that we’re using now for less risque purposes had its origins in porn,” said Enderle, who pointed to online “streaming video” as one major example of a technology that was driven by porn in its early days.

And of course the porn industries interests in wireless distribution made some big news recently when recent problems mBlox had with The Crazy Frog made them turn to mobile porn as the solution to maintaining revenues. But not everybody agrees that porn is the only ultimate sticky content revenue machine it seems to be.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because the author of the Pondering Primate, one of my favorite mobile technology weblogs, announced today that he will be attending the Mobile Adult Content Congress Conference (MAC Congress) today in Miami, where he is sure that we will witness how the porn industry is going to be an innovative and early adaptor all over again via the mobile medium.

According to the MAC Congress,

The demand for adult content services is growing. Mobile operators see this tremendous opportunity for revenue growth while realizing the added social responsibility to control and monitor delivery.

The Mobile Adult Content Congress (MACC) will examine in detail the opportunities and possible pitfalls of delivering adult content to the mobile phone.

Companies and speakers attending the conference are of course your regular porn entrepreneurs such as Playboy, the Mobile Adult Network and Ron Jeremy. But companies such as Mobile Virgin UK (no pun intended), Vodafone, Bango (mobile content/billing), the Free Speech Coalition are also slated to attend along with already existing adult mobile vendors such as Xobile and their LeapScan (links barcodes to the Internet), Pocketgirls and oh! TV (Adult Mobile Tv).

The company that best depicts the physical world connection, says the Pondering Primate, is Xobile with their LeapScan application. LeapScan turns your camera phone into a personal barcode scanner. Point your camera phone at a LeapScan code and get a movie trailer or go to a Website.

Take that idea and apply it to regular movies, political campaigns, infomercials or public service announcements and you have a pretty innovative idea for viral content or political marketing.

Innovation aside, how do American networks feel about a future mobile porn industry? Well, according to an article published last September in the New York Times the major American cellular carriers have so far been adamant in their refusal to sell pornography from the same content menus on which they sell ring tones and video games. But they may be slowly changing their minds. The cellular industry’s major trade group is drafting ratings for mobile content - akin to those for movies or video games - signaling that phones, too, will be a subject of viewer discretion.

Pornography is a tricky business for the mobile networks. On the one hand, providing pornography through their network channels may spark backlash from indecency groups as well as congress. On the other hand (provided it’s not busy doing something else) as phones become more and more capable of surfing the web, third party vendors are going to provide it anyway… and that’s a big hunk of change that the networks will be left out on.

Simply put, some version of mobile porn is inevitable. “People aren’t going to go out and buy a cellphone that streams video so they can watch a trailer of a Disney movie,” says Harvey Kaplan, director of mobile operations for Xobile.com. “But they will buy that phone if they have five minutes of ‘quiet time’ viewing sexually explicit video.” But it is an inevitability that will be dealt with on many levels and in many different ways.

When it comes to mobile porn it is also important to think outside of the hand-held box. Take the UK based Mobile content & and billing telco StealthNet, for example, who teamed up with famous gonzo-pornographer Ben Dover to create an anonymous SMS based billing system for daily video content on bendover.tv (the content changes every day). This is pornography the good old fashioned internet way, the only difference is that you are paying for it via SMS and the charge shows up on your monthly cell phone bill as “reverse billed text” or “premium text. The way it works is simple. You go to the site where you can view a sample clip of todays video. If you like what you see you send the text message “Ben” to a common short psp codes number (UK only) after which you will receive a text message in reply that has a password code. It’s a subscription service, so you get a new password each day. Simply enter your phone number and the password provided into the website and you are set for 3 hours of feature length bendover.tv viewing pleasure. And if you want more time, you can always “Click the Cock” to get another code sent to your phone for another hour of viewing pleasure. However, as Dan Lane who is the Senior Systems Administrator points out, “most people only watch for 5-7 minutes at a time, but because they can use their 3 hours whenever they like during a 24 hour period, they can watch their favourite bits a couple of times a day”

This service can also be applied to pornographic video streaming on the cell phone, but it doesn’t have to be. And porn was not exactly an innovator here, “Actually,” dan points out “ringtones and related items (wallpapers etc) have traditionally been the driving force behind premium rate SMS services although,” he points out “adult services are taking over.” I can think of a billion other uses’ for such a transaction technology other than porn. But perhaps it takes the attention of the porn industries interest in such technology to seduce the more mainstream industries to pick it up as well. That is of course if the history of porn and the internet have anything to teach us.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Mobile Applications, Entertainment, SMS/TXT/MMS, Mobile Marketing, The Networks, Mobile Culture, Mobile Society, International, Video, Mobile Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.