DisgraceTime – Adult Industry Has Eyes For iPhone 4

I have a feeling Apple’s FaceTime is going to play out just fine. How can I be sure? Because now, the adult industry is on board. Steve’s gonna be so pissed. Like it or not, the adult industry has always been a (and arguably the) major player in deciding which entertainment technologies live, and which die. After all, it was porn that popularized the VCR. It was porn that championed VHS over Beta. It was porn that helped usher in the DVD. While unsavoury, porn is nothing if not on the cutting edge of tech – adult film producers are some of the earliest adopters. And now, they’ve got their sights set on FaceTime. “A phone is such an intimate thing,” says Quentin Boyer, a spokesman for Pink Visual, “you usually don’t lend it out or have someone else use it.” Pink Visual is, of course, an adult production company, and they’ve been planning FaceTime sex chat service since the iPhone 4’s release. Ads have been posted ads on Craigslist for models – even offering up free iPhone 4s to potential employees. “It has a very personal feel – your mobile phone to hers,” says Boyer of the concept. And how. So what about Apple? Surely they’re not gonna just let this slide. What about Big Steve’s promise of ‘freedom from porn’? “Apple can’t be seen as responsible any more than makers of routers or hardware are responsible for the content you are looking at,” says Johnathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. Good point, John. But how ironic that with all the raunchy third party apps that Jobs has fought so hard to protect his users from, it will be his own that will prove the iPhone 4’s biggest pornography success. That is, of course, if this catches on. Given porn’s history, though, it’s a good bet.