Porn is a big business on the Web. Two in five Internet users visited an adult site in August, according to tracking by technology research firm ComScore Media Metrix. The company said 3 percent of all Web traffic and 2 percent of all surfing time involved an adult site.
The Internet accounted for $2.5 billion of the adult industry's $14 billion in U.S. revenue last year, about the same as revenue from cable and satellite pay-per-view showings, according to trade magazine Adult Video News.
Vivid Entertainment Group, a major adult video producer that offers high-resolution still images, video clips and footage from "voyeur cams" through its Web site, now plans to shoot shorter films specifically for the iPod and other portables.
"It could be a huge percentage of our business," said the company's chief executive, Steven Hirsch. "People love watching adult movies and to be able to carry an adult movie in your pocket is a powerful tool."
Sin City, based in Chatsworth, Calif., offers trailers of full-length adult films for the Sony PlayStation Portable, a handheld video game player. It now is planning full-length adult films for the video iPod.
Creative Technology Ltd. and iRiver are among companies with pocket-sized devices on the market; they use Windows Mobile software to display video, audio and still images. Early entrant, Archos, has a product, Jukebox, that can store and play 400 hours of video in the MPEG-4 standard.
Yet, the marketing and deal-making finesse that helped Apple rise to dominate the portable music player market are what make its new video-playing iPod a likely vessel for adult movies' expansion to portable porn.
Sex remains a tough sell to mainstream companies. Although wireless phone companies support devices that play video, they are reluctant to subject themselves to complaints.
One company that knows firsthand is Digital Orchid, which manages the delivery of streaming video to cell phones for top brands, including MLB.com, NASCAR.com, ESPN and the National Hockey League.
It also handles Hawaiian Tropic, the suntan oil company perhaps better known for its comely bikini models. That sort of content is about as racy as wireless carriers want to get, said Robert Betros, Digital Orchid's co-founder and chief technology officer.
"We won't cross that line because the carriers won't distribute it, and that's a majority of the revenue opportunity for us," Betros said. "Now they may change their tune, and in some places in Europe carriers are distributing this kind of content."
In the wireless industry, carrier-approved content exists within something referred to as a walled garden. In the United States, at least, that garden is generally safe for children.
A company called Xobile sells pornographic video clips for cell phones. No special operating system or other software is necessary — just a Web browser, which is commonplace now for phones with access to digital data networks.
That it is now easier than ever for minors to view X-rated content on portable devices concerns media watch groups that seek to protect children.
One problem is that children often grasp the technology more quickly than their parents, said Jack Samad, a senior vice president with the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families.
This is cache, read story here
