iPhone News Updated

by Sascha Segan

The iPhone is definitely a sexy phone. It's also the perfect vehicle for bringing mobile porn to Americans, according to adult content producers at the annual AVN convention in Las Vegas.

And 2008 could be the year that pornography finally breaks through to the mobile user, thanks to new deals and advanced devices like the iPhone, said Ali Joone, co-founder and director of adult content firm Digital Playground.

"Yes, it's happening," Joone said. Digital Playground already delivers its porn in customized form to the iPhone; their site even auto-detects whether iPhone users are on Wi-Fi or EDGE.

"The phones are changing," with real Web browsers, streaming video and high-quality graphics, said Kate Sylvan, marketing and PR coordinator for porn firm Pink Visual. That means phones are ready for porn – and she says the iPhone is the best platform out there so far.

This week, Pink Visual launched the first major U.S.-based porn site designed especially for iPhones. iPinkVisual.com caters to iPhone owners, with streaming video trailers and catalogs; it's more of a marketing tool than a direct content sales site, Sylvan said.

Lance Cassidy, director of marketing for user-generated porn site XTube.com, agrees that phone porn is coming soon. They're working on a mobile phone site right now, he says, and the iPhone is the ideal platform. Meanwhile, some other porn providers are rethinking their next-generation DVD stance following the decision of Warner Bros. to drop support for HD DVD.

"You have to adapt to the format [for phones], but if your standard is the Apple iPhone, no adaptation is necessary," he said.

Joone disagrees, somewhat. The cell phone's small screen means "we do a mobile edit where we use more close-ups and less wide-angle shots," he said.

Online video isn't the only way the iPhone is getting sexy. At the AVN show, OhMiBod announced a new version of their iPod-connected vibrator – this one specifically for the iPhone. The new OhMiBod "NaughtiNano" line connects to iPhones to vibrate not only to the rhythms of music playing, but to the cadences of speech on the other end of a phone call. The new models cost $69.

Apple "has made the iPhone so beautifully simple, that if the adult video world can harness that simplicity they too will prosper," said OhMiBod founder Suki Dunham, herself a former Apple employee.

But not everyone in the world of porn is convinced that phones are the next frontier.

"I just don't know how to make money" with porn on phones, said New York porn entrepreneur Joanna Angel. "Anyway, people don't watch porn in public. If you're going to be sitting by yourself, why don't you watch it on your laptop?"

"Why can't you sit by yourself and watch it on your phone?" Xtube's Cassidy shot back.

Porn producers aiming to fulfill their mobile desires must also risk the wrath of the moral majority, warned Garion Hall, chief executive of Australian porn site AbbyWinters.com. In the land down under, mobile porn had a brief heyday when wireless carriers sold it directly – until a massive public outcry shut everything down.

"Moms in the suburbs were like, 'little Johnny's getting porn on cell phones,'" and carriers removed the content, Hall said. Even in Australia, phone companies don't block porn outright– they just make it harder to get to. But that's enough to stop Hall, for now. "For us, it's only worthwhile if mobile phone providers push it to consumers," he said.

Joone, the American adult mogul, isn't as worried. He says that in the U.S., strict age verification systems could help salve carriers' concerns. And Pink Visual says they don't need any help from carriers at all to develop a market for iPhone porn.

"We're not going through AT&T. AT&T doesn't have to know anything about it," Sylvan said.

Apple had no comment on the iPhone's erotic allure.