The days of blokes nervously tip toeing up to the top shelf of newsagents for a slice of saucy sleaze look to be growing to a close, as a new report shows the explosive growth of the mobile adult content market.
A new study by Juniper Research predicts that the mobile adult content market is going to soar from $1.4 billion in 2006 to over $3.3 billion by 2011, creating $14.5 billion in revenues over the five year period.
Europe is expected to be the most lucrative market with a 39% share followed by Asia Pacific at 33%.
Back in the day, thrill seeking punters had to settle for text-based titillation, but the roll out of 3G services and more advanced phones has seen a shift to photo and video content, with Juniper expecting video to make up over 70% of mobile adult content market revenues by 2011.
Softcore in the boozer
Bruce Gibson, Research Director at Juniper Research said: “Adult content business models have succeeded in other major delivery media: print, cinema, DVD, PPV TV etc. There is no reason why the mobile channel should not be equally profitable for adult content industry players. The mobile channel will provide a different way of presenting adult content to traditional delivery channels and will reach new audiences.”
“Mobile is about fun and instant gratification,” he continued.
“I think the biggest opportunity is at the casual and “softer” end of the adult market – lads in pubs sharing a video clip after a few pints and people looking for a bit of fun when they have spare time to kill etc – not the hard core stuff.”
Much as we’d love to agree with him, we’d suggest that anyone looking at how the web grew will realise that where there’s money to be had, there’ll be no shortage of hard core pr0n.
Video sharing Websites like YouTube are starting to impact on TV viewing figures, with more people switching off and logging on.
A further 13% of those questioned said they watched online occasionally, with another 10 per cent saying they expected to start in the coming year.
The majority of the population still prefers to watch the old fashioned gogglebox, with two-thirds of the population shunning online TV and saying that had no intention of starting in the next 12 months.
Wow … things are really starting to gel across the Murdoch media businesses, as James Murdoch starts showing his hand. Perhaps this is the first real example of seeing James’ talent on with what we’ve been told was his passion – that for convergence.
A number of Sky One shows will be available over the service. Sounds great, until you imagine that 93% of the those using Sky By Broadband already own a Sky+ box – having the ability to see the shows when they want to anyway.
The pricing of PSone games to be played on the Sony PSP have been announced.
It was initially envisaged that Sony would give access to the Playstation Store through the PSP using its WiFi connection. We can see one advantage of not doing this – people wanting to use the service will need to buy a PS3!
Arriving just eight months after the announcement of the upmarket D200, Nikon’s new D80 builds on the success of 2004’s D70, offering a slew of enhancements, a larger LCD and an inevitable upping of the pixel count.
Clearly this mix’n’match approach makes sense for cost-aware Nikon, with interchangeable components helping to keep the prices down in a hugely competitive market, although the differences in build quality between the D80 and its big brother are clearly marked.
Interface upgrades
There’s also a host of new customisation options (a total of 32 custom functions) letting photographers set up the D80 to their needs.
The camera is easy to use, feels right in the hand with all the main controls falling easily to hand, and looks like it could take the occasional knock.
We spent a fair bit of time watching online advertising, as the income for Digital-Lifestyles comes in solely from it.
We see that Engadget are offering a charity auction for Save Dafur.
Ever self-aware, Engadget also point out they understand the irony of raising money for a Dafur charity, by playing a video game called Gears of War. Their defence is that their readers chose the charity and that they’d already decided what the event was going to be. As some step towards balancing this, Engadget have named the event Gears of Peace.
For a long time Health Authorities have been having kittens about the amount of people who miss their hospital appointments – and quite rightly, it’s a tremendous waste of resources, that are already stretched.
It’s not just appointments that can be handled, Orange tell us that, “Among many benefits, text messaging prompts a better response to health promotion campaigns such as invitations to receive flu jabs or attend asthma clinics.” The word promotion could be worrying if abused.
Following the trial in London, HD TV over Freeview has been judged as a success after the six months that it’s been running.
Simon Fell, Director of Technology, ITV Consumer was upbeat, “We have conclusively demonstrated that HD services can run effectively alongside standard Freeview broadcasts. All major technical hurdles are behind us, and collectively we can focus on potentially providing services for the forecasted sales of 10 million flat screen TVs by 2010.”
Industry analysts Nielsen Media Research have discovered that Apple iPod-toting consumers aren’t going ga-ga for video, with the vast majority preferring to listen to music and audio podcasts rather than watch TV or movies.
Not surprisingly this figure rises for Video iPod users, who were found to spend 11 per cent of their time watching videos.
We know that we barely ever watch video content on our mobile players, but then we’d imagine the video-playing target demographic is considerably younger than us comparative crumblies (i.e we’re over 20).