Huge, flat-panel televisions, tiny cameras and powerful computers were everywhere recently at the Sands Convention Center.
Las Vegas, after all, was playing host in early January to the grandest gadget-fest of the year — the Consumer Electronics Show. It took up 2.5 million square feet of space, and more than 120,000 tech nerds visited to learn about the most important new products of the year.
But CES was at the Las Vegas Convention Center, a couple of miles down the road.
And once you adjusted to the technology on display at the Sands, your eyes focused on what the technology was displaying: bigscreens full of mostly uncensored sex.
As passersby strolled along, you got the full effect of the other tech show in town: The Adult Video News Expo, the largest convention in the adult entertainment industry, was running, not coincidentally, on the same days as CES.
It has been this way for years, since the “porn show,” as it’s called by the city’s cab drivers, split off from CES seven years ago to establish its own identity.
Still linked
But the links remain close, fueled by the porn industry’s long-established reputation for technological innovation. The aisles of the Adult Expo were filled with attendees who hadn’t bothered to take off their CES name badges.
And the occasional female porn star — identifiable by near-nudity and see-through high-heel shoes — could be found wandering the aisles of CES, either lost or researching the latest in tiny digital camcorders.
But there was plenty of such gear at the AVN Expo, much of it more advanced and cheaper, but made by lesser-known companies, than many items at CES.
One booth at the AVN Expo — staffed by two scantily clad young women who looked bored — featured a product called Supacam. It’s a 6-megapixel digital camera and video recorder with a 2-inch LCD screen. It’s a tad larger than an iPod.
The cost? A paltry $269.
“The attendees here are interested in every aspect of technology,” said Jeff Messroch, president of TGM Digital, the Irvine, Calif., company that makes the camera. “They’re looking for price, size and functionality.”
Which is how it has always been.
The porn industry has been credited with almost single-handedly launching such ubiquitous consumer products as the VCR and the DVD player.
“We would not have anywhere near the number of VCRs or DVD players in American homes if it were not for the number of tapes and discs produced,” said Mark Kernes, senior editor at Adult Video News magazine. He added that 850 million adult videos and DVDs are being rented every year in the United States, or about three rentals per U.S. citizen.
On the Internet, adult Web sites were the first, and for many years, the only industry to make money consistently.
Pioneers in streaming video
Adult entertainment companies also pioneered downloadable and streaming video on the Internet, as well as chat rooms and instant messaging.
“A lot of actresses wanted ways to communicate with their fans,” said one AVN Expo attendee. “So instant messaging was born.”
Experts in more mainstream consumer electronics do not disagree.
“The adult-entertainment industry has a long history of being the first to pioneer new technologies,” said Sean Wargo, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association, the group that puts on CES. “They’ve helped create sales of content and, therefore, hardware. The online content has helped spur broadband Internet use and even a greater adoption of household PCs.”
Which should be no surprise, given that 44 percent of Internet users in the United States, or 72 million people, visited at least one adult site in December, according to comScore Media Metrix, a researcher of Internet use.
But adult-content Web sites also have been credited with creating many of the harmful, frustrating aspects of the Internet experience: spam, pop-up windows and spyware.
“Some in the porn industry have been responsible for creating the ensnaring types of marketing that are invasive,” Wargo said. “That includes spam, pop-ups and the kind of advertising that just won’t let you out.”
“We send more spam than I care to think about,” Kernes said. “Adult material accounts for 25 percent of the spam out there. Is that negative? Yeah, I think it is.”
“We’re masters of the pop-window,” he added. “That’s very common in adult. And with some sites, you get multiple pop-up windows. That’s effective for them, and they continue to do it.”
Effective for profits, but harmful for Web browsers — especially if they’re children.
And so the mainstream side created defenses against spam, pop-ups and spyware that, when installed and kept updated, can be effective.
Pornographers probably will play a big role in deciding the high-profile, high-impact standard of next-generation, high-definition DVDs. Two camps — Blu-Ray and HD-DVD — are competing to become the next DVD standard format.
Given the two industries’ reliance on one another, it’s no surprise that CES and the AVN Expo will take place at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas in 2006.
