By: Billy BeerSlugger
I don’t think it’s any secret that SEX SELLS! You already know this but do you have any inkling of how it has shaped the media you use to watch non-x rated movies or how the online Porn community pioneered e-commerce as well as helped the advancement of the internet in terms of broadening networks and to a certain extent internet speed increases.
Starting with the VHS vs. Betamax format wars which were similar to the Bluray vs. HD DVD format wars, it was eventually the porn makers who chose VHS that turned the tide and made it the dominant format. So in that respect Porn had a huge impact on how you watched movies in the 80’s through the late 90’s and even into the early 2000’s. If you think about it, Porn on VHS was completely revolutionary. No longer did people have to go to a movie theater and spank off with a bunch of strangers (yes this happened and still happens). People could buy a VCR and X-Rated video’s of their choice and now spank off the pornographic material in privacy of their own home. No wonder the public chose VHS as their preferred video media and made it the standard, there’s a lot of Porn watchers out there.
Further, we’ll focus on the Internet, the next evolutionary step in expediting porn to it’s inexhaustible customer base. In the early 90’s, when AOL and Compuserve were gaining subscribers by the hundreds of thousands, it wasn’t the thirst for knowledge that was fueling the hype. All at once, images that were once confined to the pages of Playboy and Penthouse were being shared freely over the internet. You didn’t need leave your house to grab naked pictures of Pam Anderson.
While still pictures pale in comparison to full motion video, I believe this was a major factor in why the Porn industry once again helped drive technology, in this case the internet to it’s current standards and availability. Streaming Porn videos and porn videos downloadable on the internet paved the way for sites like Youtube. The increased bandwidth consumption as more and more people used the internet as a Spank Bank caused Internet Service Providers to expand availability and data speed at an extremely rapid rate. Thus again, Porn helped shape the way we use technology.
With porn sites having to charge their customer base, Porn was pretty much the first adopters of online payments. Things like Ebay and Paypal may not have taken off without Porn companies ability to show that the internet could be a marketplace. Maybe the Internet without Porn doesn’t give us Youtube, Myspace or Facebook for another 10 years or so. Maybe we would still be using phone lines to dial into the internet to check out news stories and check email. Who knows. All I know is that love it or hate it, Pornography has and will continue to be (to a certain extent) a driving factor on how we view media.
In this article I’m not saying the Porn industry fuels technology, what I’m saying is that most media technology has to be adopted by the Porn Community before it will be adopted by the general public. With Avatar kind of Pioneering 3-D movie making, can you see the first 3-D porno coming out within the next year? If it makes your masturbation experience that much more enjoyable can you see 3-D TV format being adopted at an incredible rate by TV networks broadcasting in 3-D HD? Then the general public will clamor for 3-D HT TV’s. May take some time for that to happen but how else do you see TV evolving?
Next time you’re spanking it to Internet Porn think how far we’ve come from coming from Jerking Off in shady movie theaters and how far technology has advanced because of it.
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