Adventures in Three-Dimensional Porn

From VCRs to Google's business model, porn has been a high-tech innovator. Will this continue with 3-D?

The world’s first 3-D porn film opened in Hong Kong last weekend to a clearly eager audience: The film broke 3-D film attendance records, grossing more in its first weekend in Hong Kong than James Cameron’s Avatar grossed in its first weekend. CBC science and tech correspondent Peter Nowak talked to The Mark about where porn will take 3-D films.

THE MARK How has porn changed technology over the years?

PETER NOWAK: As far as communications technology is concerned, the porn industry is a major driver of it, for various reasons. The main reason is that the porn industry has always been working to improve the distribution of its products in order to get them to more people.

In terms of technology and innovation, the porn industry is an early adopter, which is almost as key as actually inventing technologies. If you or I invented a new technology, or a website, or something like that … Well, it’s great that we invented it, but we're not going to be able to do anything more with it – we're not going to be able to develop it further, or expand it, or get it ready for a mainstream audience, unless somebody first comes along and licenses it, or pays us to use it and gives us the money for development. And that's what porn is very good at doing.

The classic example is the VCR. When the VCR first came out, people in Hollywood were very busy suing its creators because they believed that the VCR would encourage the piracy of movies. But while Hollywood was suing the VCR makers, people in the porn industry were like, “Hey, this is fantastic!” The porn industry is always interested in anything that can help its distribution, and that's what the VCR did, so the porn guys were the first to jump on it back in the early 1980s. So, in the early ’80s, there were some video magazines that would run top-10 lists of movie rentals and purchases and stuff like that, and those lists were always dominated by porn titles. At the time, there were only a few mainstream movies out there – M.A.S.H., The Sound of Music, and that sort of thing – and they were right next to Debbie Does Dallas.

Another example is what was was called the “affiliate system.” This is a system in which two porn websites are linked, so that if one site runs a banner ad on the other site, and then somebody clicks on that banner ad for the other porn website, goes to that site, and signs up for a paid membership, then that site actually gives a kickback to the site that hosted the banner ad. This was happening in the early days of the web, and now you might actually recognize this system as the basis for Google's entire business model. I spoke to one executive who said that the adult industry doesn't just show the way in technology – it also often shows the way in economics. The porn industry pioneered a lot of methods for how to make money on the internet.