NEW YORK, NY — Here we go again: The mainstream media is beating the drum about porn on cell phones. A Wednesday report from Reuters called mobile phones “the next frontier for erotica.”“If the adult entertainment industry has its way, Americans will soon get a choice of free porn on cell phones — or at least some photographs of good-looking girls in bikinis,” Reuters writer Sinead Carew noted.
Where have these people been? The mobile networks have been the focus of quite a bit of attention and effort from the adult industry for at least five years, but no one has cracked that extremely tough nut yet in the U.S. Europe is another matter entirely: hardcore adult content has adorned European screens, tastefully and responsibly presented, for quite some time: In 2007, cell-phone porn drew the equivalent of $775 million from European consumers; it’s expected to top $1.5 billion by 2012, according to Juniper Research.
However, the American landscape may change this year, according to Reuters, thanks to carriers loosening control of their networks in order to ensure a greater variety of devices and services will work on them. Concurrently, they’re also beefing up security measures to protect minors. The reason? Even if the carriers can’t capitalize on the content itself (as many have sworn at least not to appear to do with pornography), they lust after the increased revenues from what they hope will be skyrocketing airtime volumes.
Among the carriers that have promised increased on-deck accessibility to services they don’t own are Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. Verizon has promised to make its network accessible to more devices and services this year, and Sprint plans to kick off a new fast wireless Web service via which consumers can view “anything they wish,” according to a spokesman for the company.
In addition, vendors with security solutions are cropping up in never-before-seen numbers to offer solutions to the age-old age-verification issue. One such company, NeuStar, told Reuters it will have a major U.S. carrier client and a content customer within six months.
“It will be impossible to stop the adult business exploitation of mobile entertainment,” industry attorney Gregory Piccionelli told Reuters. He also predicted the near-future appearance of free porn and adult-dating services on U.S. mobile phones.
Piccionelli is one of the industry insiders attending the Mobile Adult Content Conference in Miami this week. Another is ClubJenna Inc. President Jay Grdna, who gave the keynote speech on Wednesday. He indicated mobile phones are one of the distribution channels the adult industry should look to as it attempts to boost slumping revenues engendered by the flagging popularity of DVDs.
“If you don’t evolve you’re going to die… We need to make sure we’re ready,” Grdina told Reuters.
He also indicated YouTube’s plan to be available on about on 100 million high-tech cell phones may help adult entertainment move onto the devices, as well, although content producers should expect additional piracy woes to arise at the same time.
“It’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s giving away content… On the other hand, it’s expanding the brand,” Grdina told Reuters.
Within 18 months he hopes to sell images of bikini-clad ClubJenna models to mobile markets in the U.S., he added.
That fits with predictions from Gartner telecoms analyst Michael King, who told Reuters he expects mobile porn to be available in the U.S. around 2009.
Adult entertainment is “one of the bigger pieces of Web revenue,” he said. “You would assume the natural extension would be on mobile.”
