How the Pornography Encouraged the Development Of Technology

Pornography or as it is called in Vietnam with a fancier name “depraved cultural” or sometimes “leftist fine art”. In general, whatever it is, it is something that everyone likes or is curious about but rarely talks about. In this article I will mostly refer to this topic simply as porn.
Porn has a lot to do with a lot of things in life and history, but within this article we will only talk about how this kind of content affects the development of technology. What are the effects? Let’s take a look:

1. Porn and the movie industry

The first adult film “Le Coucher de la Mariée” was produced and since then filmmakers recognized that people were willing to spend a lot of money just watching others undressing on the screen. And now the adult film industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

One of the major effects of porn is that it promotes the development and use of new content delivery formats, especially in the movie industry. In 1958, the first pornographic film on the 8mm film platform was produced by Harrison Marks and then the 8mm cameras became the norm of the film industry. People no longer needed to go to the cinema to watch porn again, which could be done comfortably at home. This contributed to the explosion in the sales of 8mm camcorders and projectors.

Above is the Betamax tape and below is the VHS. Source: wikipedia

In the 1970s, the battle between Sony’s VHS (JVC) and Sony’s Betamax (VHS) formats took off. The Betamax format had better audio and video quality, but at that time Sony prohibited the use of the Betamax format to produce porn content, but not with the VHS. This limits Betamax’s sales comparing to VHS, as over half of all video tapes sold in the US at that time were porn and contributed to the loss of the Betamax format over VHS.

The same thing happened again during the transition between VHS tape format to CD. Adult movie producers were also the first to promote the production of content on CDs simply because: better video and sound quality, longer lengths and therefore users might be willing to pay more. The appearance of porn on CDs help promoting this format more in the market with faster popularity and higher sales.

And again in the battle of Blueray vs HD-DVD in the 2000s, porn played a decisive role when they decided to choose Bluray as the standard format for adult films.

2. Porn and the internet

Porn is an integral and indispensable part of the internet. Without people watching porn, the internet speed we are using today couldn’t be this fast. Sure, I know you guys go online not just to watch porn, but I’m sure there are more people who know the name of Mary Ozawa than people who know the names of those guys in the government.

If you can name these 3 actresses, you must have a very good knowledge of porn. Source: internet

Among the top 100 most visited websites in the world, five of them are porn websites and about 4% of the world’s 1 million most visited websites are porn. Traffic to porn websites is more than just traffic from Netflix, Twitter and Amazon in total, and more than 35% of all downloads from the internet are porn related.

Also porn also affects the speed of the internet. How? As more and more young people go online to watch porn videos, the demand for faster internet speed for this purpose so also escalates

3. Porn and the e-commerce

Did you know that porn websites are one of the first pages that apply online payments? Payment by credit card, identification processes, pay-per-view, monthly subscription, all were promoted by porn sites.

Porn sites are the first websites to apply online payments. Source: pinterest

Richard J. Gordon, the founder of credit card online payment platform and porn sites, his first customers, promoted the applying of this form of online payment in the 1990s, opened for the first generation of e-commerce startups.

Some even say porn sites can be considerered as one of the first successful e-commerce models in the world.

4. Porn and the communication applications

Porn is also one of the strong causes for the growth of media such as chatting. Porn sites are one of the first to feature live chat applications and thereby popularize the development of more communication applications. Did you know that the $ 20 billion Snapchat is now a popular app for teen sexting? Zalo used to be popular as an application for young males and females to have a space to flirt and send their “intimate” pictures.

Porn also helps mobi, viettel, vina card be consumed better. Source: 9gag.

Note: not the screenshot of the writer 🙂

5. Porn and the digital camera

Do you remember the old days when the picture was taken, if you wanted to see it, you had to bring your films to the store to develop to get the final result? If so, how can you save your hot photos but not to let the store developer see? Then the polaroid camera appeared and people immediately realized that they could take nude pictures of themselves or others without the fear of those photos being used by the photographers for dirty purposes. Polaroid cameras were the foundation and precursor of the digital cameras we use today.

A digital camera advertising of Pentax ~

6. Porn and the Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR)

You’ve probably seen from the above sections that porn makers have been always the first to jump into the latest technologies and applications and this has not changed untill now.

With virtual reality – VR, since hardware support became more popular, porn with VR technology has also begun to appear. You can see the first testers to experience porn on VR like here:

Although with AR, there are no real hardware platforms available for AR to develop (before there was the Google Glass Project, but was temporarily stopped, Microsoft Hololens has not yet done a single move). But porn producers already think of what role AR is going to play in porn. You can watch this funny video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxt24JoLlPE (+18 age required and need to login Youtube to see)

From the video above we can see that porn has a significant impact on some of the technological advances and in some cases is the underlying motive behind technology development. And this tells us that the motivation for human development is partly driven by our own original instincts. From the perspective of a marketer, we need to understand how instinct plays a role in making people buy products. From the perspective of a product maker, we need to understand in which direction users will be able to use our products. Please leave your comments on this issue below.