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ETO Technology News - March 2006 edition
Launched as a new feature for Erotic Trade Only, this regular roundup will focus on 'non-traditional' adult content distribution media, technology and its channel. That's VOD, mobile phone, PDA, iPorn and Pervy Internet news to you. If you have a story or press release you think should be included in a future issue, please contact our Technology Editor, Paul Smith via Paul@EroticTradeOnly.com.
The real price of great Sex(.com)
Arguably the most valuable corner of t'internet (although the British MillionDollarHomePage.com must've got close for a single page last month, at $1 per hotlinked pixel on a 1000x1000 grid. An adult version? Someone, quick!) was recently bought by Boston-based investment group Escom LLC. They said in a press release that they hope it'll become, "the market-leading adult-entertainment destination." AT the time of writing it has their name at the bottom of the screen, which is all link ads to other sites at the moment. You have to love flashing text animated GIFs. The lucky seller was San Diego website developer Gary Kremen, who's pocketed a reported $12-14million in cash and stocks from the deal while retaining some rights to the name and related technology he's developed. He's also the man behind successful dating-site Match.com, now owned by IAC. Although Kremen refuses to comment on the deal, it's rumoured he's not sold the Sex.com address outright, but simply a majority share of the rights to use the name, keeping the remainder for himself. It's thought this is the biggest sale of its kind, easily beating 1999's Business.com's $7.5m, Beer.com's $7m and Shop.com's $3.5m. Proving where there's muck there's brass.
It could have been a very different story - Having first registered it in May 1994, in 1995 Sex.com was 'stolen' off Kremen in latter-day Colonel Blood style by one Stephen Cohen, who used some of its significant revenue generation during the dot-com-boom to thwart Kremen's attempts to get it back. Eventually, having spent several million dollars in legal fees, Kremen won his case and $65m damages, prompting Cohen to hotfoot it to Mexico. He was rearrested there in October '05 and is currently in a US jail, claiming to have lost his memory due to a stroke while on the run. Kremen asserts he's not received a dime of the $65m in lost profits and costs awarded to him (although he is now living in Cohen's ritzy former home. To the victor the spoils) and plans to try to recover the money by unravelling the network of hidden offshore bank accounts and businesses that Cohen set up to squirrel it away - and now can't remember. Kremen may also pursue VeriSign-subsidiary Network Solutions, who manage .com registrations, for an additional estimated $100million because they let Cohen run off with Sex.com in the first place. Budding con men may wish to note all it took was some forged letters requesting a change of ownership. Watch for the film of the above in a cinema near you in summer 2008 (allegedly).
'Ron Jeremy's got a lovely ring' shocker.
Kitten Digital, global publishers of adult mobile content, launched two Rampant Ron-based products on St. Valentine's Day, saying they're both bound to bring hours of entertainment to men and women alike. The Ron Jeremy Stimulator, which makes a phone a vibrator without having to text yourself silly, comes complete with 'arousing visuals' and a funky 70's soundtrack so everyone will know what's going on in your pants. Four settings, soft, medium, hard and boost give users a choice, depending on how much vibration they can handle.
Ron Jeremy's Truth or Dare is a multi-player adult 'spin the bottle' game available in hard and soft versions to suit your market. Both have official licensed branding from the great man himself. Ron comments: "Truth or Dare is a flirtatious device used by people all over the world so what better way to bring it to the masses and get people playing with each other everywhere! I've pleasured women with lots of different devices in my time and this is just the natural progression. Women normally choose the smallest mobile phone available but I'm predicting that trend to change dramatically!"
The Java-based app's are suitable for most colour-screen phones and can be offered by resellers for download via the web or WAP, with more saucy games from Kitten Digital scheduled for release later this year. Contact Kitten Digital's Philip Bourchier O'Ferrall via philip@kittendigital.com for a PDF info pack.
Getting cross about .xxx?
The on, off, on, off, on, off saga of .xxx domains rolls on. Latest word from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the 'net address management people, about the .xxx web extension is, "a decision could come in the first few months of 2006", thanks to much twitching from conservative US politicians, including the Bush administration. Other than the USA, only Brazil has objected to the .xxx plan. If or when it comes, ICM Registry is set to operate the domain, having lobbied long and hard for it since it was first mooted in 2000. Debate still rages as to whether this is a good thing for online adult businesses or not. On the one hand it'll make parental (and, perhaps more sinisterly, beyond) control on what 'net content is accessible easy. There'll just be a box marked 'Block all .xxx addresses' to tick. Anything that helps legitimise adult sites by keeping them for adults only has to be a good thing for the industry, but it's not beyond states to control web content access and this would play straight into their hands. Which brings us to the opposite view, that this will 'ghettoise' the web into what's lovely and clean and smelling of flowers and what's nasty and evil and smelling of unwashed crotches. At least folks will be able to find just what they want without having to consider the .com/.co.uk/.net/.etc element. If only someone had thought to say .org stood for orgasm or orgy rather than organisation years ago all this could have been avoided. Just so you know, .sex, .porn and .adult were all felt to be too vague or too Anglo-Saxon for highlighting pornography on the World Wide web and aren't likely to appear in future.
Which? Magazine find a hole, and stick their finger on it.
Children are accessing Internet porn sites via a mobile phone because of a loophole in 'phone safeguards, they say. By obtaining access codes for 'secure' sites with premium rate £1.50 text messages, Which? editor Malcolm Coles says there's nothing to stop kids getting hold of hardcore through their mobile phones. They used an O2 phone registered to a 15-year-old girl to prove their point. Researchers got codes for eight porn sites to add weight to their claims. Filters used by O2 did block adult material from being sent directly to the handset, but didn't halt the access codes to web sites showing hardcore sex videos which young viewers could see, the consumer group warned. Which? say the number of pay-per-view internet sites accepting payment by premium rate text messages had rapidly increased over the past few years. Mr Coles added, "There are supposed to be safeguards to stop this sort of thing, but they're obviously ineffective. This loophole needs to be closed as soon as possible."
A spokesman for O2 stressed that the firm took the subject of adult website access via mobile phone text payment, "very seriously". He added, "We have an age verification process for any commercial content that can be viewed on a mobile phone. We also offer a parental control on all of our mobiles that can be activated from the phone. While it's the responsibility of those websites to prevent under-18s from viewing the content on a computer, we do not want our mobiles to be used as a payment mechanism without age verification. We are in the process of updating the agreements in place with companies that provide mobile content over our network."
ICSTIS, the industry regulator, state phone firms and Internet service providers have a duty to check the age of their users. A spokesman shrewdly said, "The situation shouldn't be allowed to continue. Obviously this is a loophole. Kids can access adult content on their PC screens and be billed via their mobile phones. We are working with the mobile phone networks to look at how this loophole can be blocked."
The fight hots-up for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
Confucius said the only thing you can be sure of is change. I say you can't even be sure of that. While VHS coughs up blood and calls for a priest, you can't argue it's not had a good innings as it first become popular around 1980. DVD's not yet in double figures and may not reach 10 as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD gear up. The key difference is the former holds 50Gb, about 5x DVD and 40% more data than the 30Gb max of the latter. Figures based on dual-layer discs. HD-DVD talk of a future dual-sided version of the format, doubling its figures. And both players are expected to be fitted with current technology red laser diodes as well as shorter wavelength (405nm) hi-res blue lasers, so your DVD collection needn't appear on eBay just yet. It's said Blu-Ray has better copy protection too, making it harder to pirate and more attractive to studios.
So is it Betamax Vs. VHS all over again as Sony's Blu-Ray squares off against everyone else's HD-DVD? Digital Playground (makers of 'Pirates') are supporting Blu-Ray, citing Sony's PlayStation3 as the route it'll initially find broad support in homes. They started filming using HD cameras last year, to make their growing back-catalogue future-proof. I assume, despite being developing technology leaders generally, most of the adult industry will sit back and wait for the fight to finish before sheepishly joining the winner. However, that's not to say we shouldn't know who to be cheering for. It may well be Hollywood studios that have the final say, as 20th Century Fox and Lionsgate have got fully behind Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Blu-Ray. The only major to pin their colours exclusively to the HD-DVD flagpole is Universal. Paramount and Warner Bro's. have a foot in both camps.
Toshiba's first two HD-DVD players are due for release this month, and are expected to retail around £280 and £450. As this is about half the price of the equivalent Blu-Ray players which will follow in a couple of months, perhaps it's not Hollywood which will decide which format wins out, it's the shoppers in Dixons, Cricklewood.
So, a change is coming. But even Confucius couldn't tell you which change. Since I'm not as wise as him my money is on HD-DVD as it's closely related to current DVD manufacturing techniques. The quantum leap of Blu-Ray, despite being superior in many ways, may be a step too far simply because it's easier, cheaper and faster to retool to make HD-DVD discs and players. To answer my earlier apparently rhetorical question: In a nutshell, yes.
Blocked at every turn. Fortunately.
Widely reported in the media recently, the 35,000 daily (Daily!) searches for child porn blocked by BT should also make the legitimate, law-abiding industry nervous. While any right-minded person realises the differences between porn and child porn, many people instead notice the clear link between the two: the word Porn. Some of these people are in positions of power and having the headline grabbing 35k per day figure banded about the world's news media makes them edgy. Sadly it's too much to ask that media to call child porn by its correct name: recordings of child sex abuse. Not so catchy.
BT are the ISP of approximately one third of the UK's surfers and it's their Cleanfeed technology that's highlighting this problem which has grown over 300% in 18 months. That's despite many high-profile prosecutions for possession of obscene images of a minor. However, BT say the apparent huge rise may be partly due to more sites being identified as paedophilic and their keeping a closer look on traffic, rather than lots more people looking for such material much more enthusiastically. Unlike Google's dilemma, where the US government has threatened to subpoena them to get search records, Cleanfeed doesn't identify individual users, just sites.
At the moment users being repelled simply get a traditional 404, Page Not Found message, but this may change to 'Page blocked due to inappropriate content', or something similar soon. The argument against having an alarm go off and 'You Sick Bastard' flash on the screen is basically people click on links without always knowing where it's taking them. Which is fair enough. But a 404 message doesn't inform the unaware not to click that link again, whereas a subtle warning would. BT's 3 million Internet users are restricted from accessing, or perhaps I should say protected from, sites blacklisted by IWF, the Internet Watch Foundation. This charity was launched in 1996 to help police the 1978 Child Protection Act online. An excellent argument for censorship, which the UK adult industry should be seen to get behind.
Don't talk to the face, talk to the adult 3G video chat portal.
Last month Barcelona's 3GSM Conference and Exhibition was buzzing with talk of Spanish firm 3OOOH Mobile Entertainment's new service: Seamless two-way live video sex on a 3G mobile. They're first-to-market with this premium-rate offering, where users place a video call to 'Sexy Susie' via their 3G phone and things get intimate. The twist is Susie can see the action at the other end of the 'line', and will no doubt be flattering service users about the size of their handset. Some observers (of the technology, not the…) see 3OOOH as having set the standard for things to come in a market that's all set to explode. Fnarr.
3OOOH Mobile Entertainment, who claim theirs is Europe's first adult 3G video chat portal, are going to offer different versions (gay, straight, Brazilian, Czech blondes, brunettes…) and various languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch and Hungarian) of the D2C (Direct To Consumer) service. It makes sense. If saying, "squeeze your breasts together" gets the response, "Je suis désolé, je ne comprends pas l'anglais", the caller may not wish to break off activities to speak the international language of mime. 3OOOH say making the two-way video and voice call is as simple as making any phone call, although I say having somewhere to balance your phone would be an advantage. Your dashboard not, perhaps, being the best place.
The company aims to sign further deals with television stations, print media and online publishers for promoting premium rate video short-code numbers in their respective markets. Rapidly growing, the company's been in mentioned in Forbes and Fortune Magazine and the conservative figure of 40% of premium phone traffic being adult services is about to skyrocket, according to 'industry insiders'. With this 3G-only service being launched, perhaps the 'next-generation' mobile industry will have the killer app it needs.
CCTV Tee-hee.
Soft news, and CCTV may not count as new media, but it's alleged fans of the Australian singer, and Kylie's little sister, Dannii Minogue were left shocked in February when she was caught enjoying a lesbian romp with a naked lap-dancer at the swanky 'Puss In Boots' club in London. According to an unnamed source, not only did she get it on with a busty blonde stripper (aren't they always?) on the dance floor in front of the club's other visitors, it was all caught on CCTV. The source allegedly went on to say "Dannii was having the time of her life and didn't care who saw. She wasn't in a private booth or the VIP area. I can't believe how far they went. It was more like a porn film. There were hands and tongues everywhere. I thought it was going to turn into a full-on orgy." I for one keenly await the tape's commercial release, and dream of a wholly wrong 'Minogue on Minogue' follow up. P.S. Get well soon Kylie.
DIY movies, starring all your favourite babes?
Launched in 1997, AdultDVDEmpire.com is one of the State's longest established hardcore DVD suppliers. They've won AVN's Best Retail Website award for the last three years and boast 75,000 product lines, including virtually every new adult film release. They also sell novelty items, rent DVDs and have a used DVD purchase and sales division.
They've recently been granted US patents covering their pay-per-minute international VOD site's new features. In October last year they launched MyClips™, a system to allow users to 'highlight' and save specific scenes or, as the name suggests, clips from films on their account, giving easy access to that material again without having to hunt for it 'against the clock' later. MyFlix™ is an extension of the same technology, brought online in February. It means customers can take their saved online library of clips and assemble their own streaming movies from them by picking favourites and arranging them into whichever order gets the required result, as a kind of highlight reel. This new feature follows six months of development and Beta testing and supports RSS feeds, as well as making these 'best-of' collections available publicly, if users want to share their recommendations.
Mike Barry, Director of Adult Operations at Adult DVD Empire had this to say, "Our customer experience is second to none. We want customers to enjoy our entire library of content. However, when they find something they like they shouldn't have to waste their 'paid for' minutes finding that specific content all over again. With over 14,000 streaming titles available, this can be quite a time saver."
LG target 3G sales.
Not very adult, but everyone needs a handset to get mobile porn. As a relative newcomer to the mobile phone market, LG Electronics have taken the bold step of saying they expect to grow their global sales of 3G phones from a solid 3.8m units in 2005 to a whopping 6m in 2006. By 2009 it's estimated a billion mobile phones (not just 3G) will be in worldwide circulation. LG released a new range of phones earlier this year, including the B2050 and the clamshell F2400, which features a 128x160 65k colour TFT screen that's ideal for showing pink. They hope to compete with more established rivals, especially an entrenched Nokia, in this lucrative market. I should say potentially lucrative, as last year LG's telecommunications division posted an operating loss of $4 billion from phone sales over the second quarter of the year. Still, it's only money.
$2 billion Bandwagon - When will the yanks climb on board?
Following on from the two-day Mobile Adult Content Congress that took place at the Radisson Hotel, Miami in January, US analysts are predicting mobile porn will generate around $2 billion in global revenue by 2009. As yet the market's been slow to develop in America, where a mere $30m of the estimated $1.2 billion generated by adult mobile content in 2005 was created. Porn-on-the-go is a hot potato for leading cellular carriers stateside. They fear a backlash from the religious right and conservatives if they follow European trends and distribute X-rated content. Even here Vodafone Group PLC were dubbed 'Vodafilth' in one British newspaper, demonstrating the Swiftian wit and eye for wordplay we're known for. Yet mobile phone pornography is a very fast-growing business that many US cell-phone industry commentators say will soon catch on in the States, when their consumers realise what they're missing out on.
Charmaine Woeft, vice president of the Family Research Council in Washington D.C won't approve. Woeft said, "Cell carriers are going to have to choose between parents and pornographers. We are very concerned and we are paying attention. Pornographers have their own little playground on the Internet; now they are looking to give porn legs." Ah, the land of the free!
Closing thought on digital technology: There are 10 sorts of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.