Wide World of Porn- Obscene phone calls are about to take on a whole new meaning.
As a new generation of mobile phones begins to offer video-on-demand service, analysts predict naughty movies will soon be a popular download.
The major carriers are hanging back, but others are jumping into what Yankee Group analyst Adam Zawel expects will be a $100 million industry in the United States by 2008.
“There are small carriers that are out there looking aggressively toward doing this sometime this year,” said L.R. Clinton Fayling, president of Brickhouse Media, a Denver-based startup that is working with cell phone carriers to provide adult content.
Already, the company offers some cell phone customers the ability to download provocatively posed pictures of porn stars like Jennifer Drake and Adriana Sage to use as their phone’s wallpaper.
Carriers will be more inclined to jump into the ring once the industry issues rules this summer on age verification to ensure kids can’t see smut, Fayling said.
In Europe and Latin America, erotic content makes up as much as a quarter of all traffic on mobile phone networks in what analysts expect will be a $1 billion market there this year.
But U.S. companies have been skittish to cash in.
“We have no plans to offer that kind of content,” said Verizon Wireless spokesman David Samberg, adding that the company has even pulled music videos with “over the top” content.
“There’s desire to make money from it, but there’s also a fear of bad press and damage to the brand name,” Zawel said. In the meantime, there are adult sites popping up that bypass the phone carriers altogether. Gramercy-based Wicked Wireless plans to let customers swap sexy text messages with porn starlets.
“The idea is to make it peer to peer, rather than to the public,” said Dennis Odamo, chief executive officer of the company. “The phone company doesn’t care what you say to each other, but they do care what they say to an audience.”
Other Web sites out there such as Mobog let users swap pictures taken with cell phone cameras, and there are erotic Web sites designed especially for phones that have Net browsers.