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Portable Porn @ technology.com
Pornography takes a firm foothold on mobiles,
Playstations, iPods and podcasts.
OUR TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
10th November 2005
In the beginning was sex, which was restricted to
bedrooms. As humanity evolved, it sneaked out
into movies and hoardings. The Internet boom
brought it within the potential reach of every
desktop in the world. Sony's Playstation Portable
and Apple's Video iPod were perfect catchment
areas for the XXX-Men. Soon, mobile technology
blossomed, and MMS became the latest platform to
play steamy sex clips. With bandwidth and
technology expanding every second, it's play-time
now for the purveyors of porn.
For us Indians, the DPS MMS scandal was the first
hit from the Blue Yonder, where a schoolboy filmed
his peccadilloes with his girlfriend, only to
circulate it among his friends later. The infamous
DPS MMS clip found its way to internet sites and
auction portal Bazee, whose CEO was later arrested
in the case.
The DPS clip seemed to be just the tip of the
iceberg. Many more private sex videos, shot on
handy mobile phones appeared on the Internet and
cellphones, providing feasts for the voyeur's
eyes and destroying many a peaceful marital life.
Last month, a Delhi engineer filed a police
complaint that some of his private moments with
his wife were shot in secret by a hotel where they
were staying. Many spycam movies appeared on the
Internet and jumped to the mobile platform,
courtesy wi-fi and Bluetooth.
The mobile screen attained puberty with the
arrival of high-capacity cellphones, powered by
expanding mobile bandwidth and new transmission
technologies. Vast gigabytes of storage space
helped hoard vast amounts of data, and
high-bandwidth, cheap and user-friendly
transmission technologies like Bluetooth ensured
that the sex videos could be transmitted from
mobile to mobile with considerable ease, and
without the prying eyes of law-enforcers and
mobile operators. Since Bluetooth does not require
a mobile operator's service, it meant that the
clips could be sent from mobile to mobile at zero
cost.
Mobile sex clips started circulating with alarming
regularity, once users woke up to emerging
technologies. In just one year, there have been
numerous cases in India, where private sex clips,
many of them featuring celebrities, made it to the
public domain. The most high-profile case has been the so-called Mallika Sherawat MMS
scandal, where a mobile clip named mallika.gp
started doing the rounds. This clip showed an
actress with an amazing facial similarity to
actress Mallika Sherawat engaged in sex with a
Caucasian. Mallika filed a suit; however, no one
was arrested in the case. Later, it came to light
that it was not Mallika, but Lolly, a Mexican
actress who starred in the controversial clip.
Some mischief-maker had added a song from Mallika's movie
Murder, renamed the file as Mallika, and converted the video to mobile format.
It seems the pornsters have a talent for spotting
newer and newer media capable of playing their
content. After raiding the Internet and the mobile
screen, the next in crosshairs was Sony's
PlayStation Portable. Though the gadget was
designed by Sony to play games, the X-files were
soon to crop up in the cute gadget, much to Sony's
irritation. The company condemned PlayStation porn, but could
do little to
prevent it.
The next victim was the Apple iPod and its
pioneering podcasting venture. Podcasting, simply
put, is an internet radio service, where radio
programs are streamed as audio files to a
computer, instead of beamed by a satellite or
transmission towers. Podcasts (radio programmes)
can be downloaded to a computer and copied to an
iPod through iTunes online music store. Soon,
sexually-explicit 'porncasts' appeared on the Net.
Some of the milder ones were even hosted on iTunes,
a proprietary Apple online music
store-cum-software. Apple, as a principle, does
not host pornographic content on iTunes, but the
pornmeisters did not need the online service to
hawk porncasts - it could be downloaded from
anywhere for free.
Porncasts, which were basically audio files, had
limited scope till the arrival of the
movie-playing video iPod. The video iPod, which
could stock and play upto 150 hours of video came
as a godsend to the sex content industry waiting
for the next big thing. Besides, the video iPod
could be plugged to a television or computer to
watch the movie on big-screen. Even as Apple and
iPod made giant strides in bringing technology to
the common man, the the X-Men latched on to the
bandwagon. Though playing sex clips was hardly the
idea behind the video iPod, it caught on
quickly.
Even before the arrival of the latest iPod range
and the PlayStation, clips of legacy internet
celebrity sex videos like the ones starring Pamela
Anderson and Paris Hilton had made their way to
the mobile phone. In fact, the so-called Mallika
clip was also a sex video shot across several
minutes, changed to a mobile video format. Since
the technology to change the ordinary video file
to a mobile-compatible one is so elementary, it
now takes so little time for Internet sex videos
to hit the mobile screen.
Currently, mobile phone operators both in India
and abroad dish out several value-added content
services for subscribers, including news, cricket,
astrology, jokes, ring tones and general movie
clips. There are some ambitious operators who have
even started providing clips of popular TV
serials, attempting to attract and retain users.
Video iPod buyers in US can even watch episodes of
popular serials like Desperate Housewives on
mobile after they are telecast on TV. There are
more operators who would like to offer video on
mobiles, though bandwidth and cost constraints
have played spoilsport in India so far. However,
it will be only a matter of time before
multimedia-capable mobile phones start playing
movies of your choice. And this will not be one of
those predictions of the dotcom era when we
waited for fridges which would dial the grocery
shop via internet. In any case, the mobile services industry is
sharply aware of the potential of marketing sex
across portable devices. Eyebrows were raised last
week, when leading US telecom operators Verizon
and Cingular tied up to create standards for a
ratings system for content to be beamed on the
mobile. The move triggered fears that this could
be the beginning of selective offerings of adult
content on mobile phones. Questions remain as to
how the operators can prevent the such content -
if they offer any - from reaching younger
audiences.
Marketing wizards have been quick to take note:
the latest MMS to hit cellphones in India is the Fardeen Khan-Koena
Mitra MMS. The MMS features Bollywood actors
Fardeen and Koena in a song, which features the
couple in explicit video. The song is from the
movie Ek Khiladi Ek Haseena, produced by Pritish
Nandy Communications. Unlike stolen spycam shots,
the Fardeen-Koena MMS features a song from the
movie, used by the producers to create a
pre-release buzz. The producers, far from being
apologetic about the MMS have, in fact, gushed at
the potential of MMS marketing. The Fardeen-Koena
MMS is not available for download from websites or
SMS codes like 8888, but it will be only a matter
of time before the steamy scenes pop up in your
inbox. We are yet to have a glimpse of the MMS,
but producer Pritish Nandy has claimed in
interviews that it is a song from the movie which
has been cleared by the Censor board - though with
an 'A' certificate. What about the adult content
landing up in mobile phones toted by youngsters?
Nandy is unfazed: "I grew up in a generation that
taught us that we should make love and not war,"
he says, adding, "Sex has never caused damage to
the world."
Really? Pritish Nandy's point may be debatable,
but it is beyond doubt that sex-on-portable
devices has come to stay. As gadgets and
technologies evolve, building more and more
audio-video capabilities, the purveyors of porn
will keep finding fresh avenues to hawk their ware
for porn-on-the-go. Till sufficient legal
mechanisms evolve to check unbridled adult
content, portable porn will keep
pace with technology.
OUR TECHNOLOGY EDITOR |
