10 Ways Adult Entertainment Changed the Tech Industry

Superior technology and cheaper pricing had a huge hand in VHS beating Betamax. However, numbers don't lie. Adult content was only available on cassette during the 70s, with porn films making up over 50 percent of videotape sales in the US, 80 percent in Germany and Great Britain. Debbie Does Dallas was even the best-selling VHS tape in 1978. Fast-forward to the late 90s, porn continued to change the media format landscape by accounting for nearly 90 percent of the DVD-video market share. Now look where its transcended.

Imagine checking out ass shots of Kim Kardashian in code. Not so tantalizing. But when the World Wide Web was nonexistent, ASCII porn was regarded as the “world’s first Internet pornography.” The character-encoded format became popular due to its high compatibility with most computers, simple rendering, and transferability via network protocols and email. ASCII art would go on to inspire advancements in graphic design and computer imaging.

Cable television created a multimedia platform that brought near-limitless content to everyone’s home. But before companies like Time Warner racked up subscriptions solely on the basis on carrying XXX-rated channels like Playboy and the Spice Network, there was Manhattan Public Access Cable—a provider in the 70s that managed to increase subscriptions from 100,000 to 300,000 after airing two seasons of an adult program titled “The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex and Violence”. In 1999, DirecTV sources disclosed the revenue of customers who brought adult movies, estimating up to 150 million spent by 8 million subscribers.

Ever looked at porn on a dial-up connection? Brutal. Penthouse magazine was ahead of the curb in the '90s when it began distributing 2400-baud modems to its readers so they could have faster access to the company’s XXX bulletin boards. In October 2000, the New York Times reported that nearly 20 percent of AT&T’s broadband costumers were watching “real, live all-American sex” online and paying $10 per film, while a 2003 Nielsen study discovered the heavy broadband use in Europe was due to the sharing of music and porn.

Forget Skype, Tango, or iChat. Back in the day, adult sites were the only places you could engage in any form of real-time interaction. Porn domains allowed users to view a live feed of a person and engage in communication through a web cam. Yet another first for the adult biz.

Amazon and every major online retailer owe some gratitude to Richard Gordon, the founder of Electronic Card Systems. In the mid-90s, Gordon's credit card transactions system introduced online payments and provided services to top porn sites including the same outlet that published the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape: ClubLove. Statistics gathered by Forrester Research indicate nearly $1.3 billion was spent on Internet porn in 1999, with the industry generating close to $2.8 billion in revenues by 2006.

Patchen Barss, author of The Erotic Engine, claims Dutch porn company Red Light District created the first “workable Internet-based video streaming system” in 1994, setting the mold for CNN’s online service one year later and YouTube a decade after. Digital porn queen and founder of Danni’s Hard Drive, Danni Ashe, said, "The adult entertainment industry was the first to use streaming JPEG push video, which was a video that worked (...) in the browser and didn't require a plug-in."

Porn companies are the biggest hustlers in the tech game. Once digital piracy developed into a pandemic, porn companies started investing in digital-rights management software to protect content. Developers Playa Solutions built a program that would bring up a payment screen to view videos or inform users that they could gain access to clips by watching ads. Another way porn sites have cashed in is by applying new business strategies such as affiliate marketing, where sites share content with its competitors, placing a primary focus on revenue and traffic optimization.

Geolocation software is most identified with location-based social networking platforms like Forsquare and Gowalla. Gambling and porn sites paved the road for the technology, pinpointing the specific location of users and targeting promotions best suited for their location.

Private chat sessions, networking sites, peer-to-peer sharing, and other online social staples can all be traced back to the porn industry. Domains like FriendFinder (AKA Adult Friend Finder) were founded in 1996, the same year AOL launched its Instant messaging service. FriendFinder provided a place for users to create a profile and interact with others. Sound familiar? Porn also ushered in an age of file-sharing which has yet to abate. According to the NPD Group, pornography accounts for 60% of all P2P downloads. Sounds about right.