Naked innovation online

• Tags:
• New Technology,
• Emerging Technology,
• Streaming Video,
• Innovation

Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 18 Nov 2005 15:10 GMT

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...organisations to come up with a business case for exploiting new distribution channels, far more so than in other industries.

"For an adult movie producer, for example, the Internet opened up markets to a global audience rather than limiting sales to, say, sex-shops in the US. They could spend £200,000 on server farms to provide streaming video and chat and probably pay it off in a couple of months," says Forrester's Jackson.

Another related driver, however, was the need to find "better ways of satisfying demand ahead of legislation". "Cultural and legislative barriers have always driven innovation because people spend time working out what's illegal and what's not and invent a technology solution to get round the problem. Videos resulted from that impetus because they were originally unclassified and the age rating didn't apply to them — only to films played in cinemas," Jackson explains

Ratings don't apply
Recently, another factor that has influenced the market is simply the plethora of adult Web sites now available. "The industry reaped the benefits of a low cost-of-entry in 2000, but it's so low that anyone can set up a server with videos and pictures and start charging. This has led the industry to commoditise to a degree," says Jackson.

Pace agrees, but believes that this, in turn, has spawned more innovative approaches to presentation. "Finding a way to differentiate your site from others is the key. For the most part, the content you have on one site can be found on another, so the only way to keep your customers is to find a way to present that content to them in a format that is somehow better than your competitors," he says.

This has led to the adoption of technologies such as searchable databases and instant access, which "came straight out of the desire to get adult content as fast as possible". Other techniques include services such as geolocation. This enables web sites to determine users' geographic latitude and longitude and work out in which city or region users are located by comparing their IP address with the known locations of local servers and routers. "By using geolocation, sites can figure out who to pair their users with, what they may be interested in because of their area and so on" says Pace.

Porn in your pocket
But the fact that "content delivery is what the adult industry is all about" has also led to the exploration of new channels to market. Porn in your pocket in the shape of devices such as mobile phones and PDAs is an attractive proposition to the adult industry.

Although revenue predictions for adult content on mobile devices vary from analyst to analyst, the consensus is that it it's going to be lucrative. Juniper Research, for example, estimates...

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