In recent news published by ConceivablyTech, Digital Playground, one of the major players in the US adult entertainment market (p0rn to you and me), has become Apple's unexpected ally in their long-standing “war” with Adobe Flash. ConceivablyTech explains adult movie production company,  Digital Playground has said "that it will abandon Flash as soon as the desktop browsers fully support HTML 5."

This is potentially a turning point against Adobe’s Flash. A momentous victory beckons, although Apple might not thank the adult market too much, in public anyway. They were after all very keen to remove the availability of grown-up apps being available for download (with a few notable exceptions where the business men had already done their deals).

History as shown us, where p0rn leads, we all inevitably follow, whether you’re a fan or not. If it were not for those pioneers in the adult sector we would not be enjoying many of the household and some elements of the internet that we take for granted.

The adult film industry brought us the home video recorder, the home video camera – it’s no coincidence that about 30 minutes after the Lumière Brothers invented the film camera, their dodgy cousin Albert was round the back of the local bordello making ‘homemade films’ of his own, such is power of the adult industry. It also brought us many of the online marketing techniques that are in common use today, the microwave oven and hand-held calculators. (OK, so I might have made the last few up).

The adult sector has also influenced and helped win format wars in the past. It was the critical factor when VHS won over Betamax and it is a relatively open secret that Blu-ray got an advantage over HD-DVD because of p0rn – Playstation 3 indirectly promoted sales of high-res adult movies in much greater volumes than the HD DVD. As a result, the major US adult movie studios ceased the production of HD DVDs several months before Toshiba said that it would stop making the format.

A while ago, I used to work in the adult entertainment sector – rest easy, dear readers, I was far away from the business end of a camera - however, it is my belief that the adult film industry will have a say in the HTML 5-Flash battle as well. I asked a contact who still works within the business and they stated…

“HTML5 is certainly very attractive to the adult industry for a number of reasons, but the main one is that to protect margins we only want to build once – and if HTML5 works on all platforms, then it will de facto, become our standard. The Apple market is made up of our core target audience – young men who are early adopters – and while Jobs may believe he is the moral guardian of the world, we can already see that the people buying his products want our content. It’s a huge market that the adult industry cannot ignore – and why would be build in Flash and html5?”

While Adobe are probably trying everything they can to patch up Flash, to make it less power-hungry and more reliable, the future is inevitably mobile (therefore it needs to be less power consuming, touch screen friendly and open standard) and does not really seem to have a place for Flash as it’s fundamentally not too friendly for mobile devices.

Other forces are at work too. There is an awful lot of money swilling around in the adult entertainment sector. It is estimated that the industry makes around £10 billion in online revenues per annum. Users want it too; According to Alexa.com, among the 100 most popular websites in the UK, seven are porn-related. Internationally it is estimated that roughly one in 8 of all websites carry p0rnographic content.

With market demands and huge pots of cash at stake, too many influencing forces are in play for this not to happen. I feel that we are seeing the beginning of the end of Flash – and Steve Jobs will be quite happy I imagine, but also a little disappointed to realize that it’s not all his doing; it’s the p0rno industry…again.

I look forward to the iW@nk app available as a download soon as possible.
 
Sources:
www.conceivablytech.com/1553/business/an-unexpected-apple-ally-porn-industry-to-drop-flash/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/steve-jobs-adobe-flash-at_n_556839.html
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;4/GB