Hard-selling The Sex Drive

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday May 1, 1995

BY JON CASIMIR

DOWNTOWN San Francisco. The marquee outside the Art Theatres in Taylor Street screams a message at passersby: "XXX CD-Rom here now! More than you can shake your hard disc at!"

Inside, between the shelves of pornographic videos and sex toys, is a pair of racks filled with CD-Roms, at least 50 of them, all with titles like Virtual Vixens, Deep Throat Girls, Nightwatch Interactive, Bikini Beach and Dream Machine.

"Yeah, they sell," says the guy behind the counter, with a grin that lets you know the size of the understatement.

No figures have been collected yet - no-one is keen to share information in this cut-throat industry - but one tracking firm, PC Data, of Reston, Virginia, has estimated that the hundred or so companies releasing pornographic CD-Roms in the US account for 20 per cent of the market. That would mean that America spent $US260 million ($A356 million) last year on making its hard-drive hardcore.

Vivid Video, which has released 500 movies in its 10-year existence as a video distribution company, moved in the digital direction three years ago and has so far published 44 CD-Rom titles.

"We are releasing a minimum of two or three interactive titles a month," a spokeswoman says. "We're just trying to create a supply to meet a huge demand."

She's not kidding. You don't have to cruise the porn shops to buy them. Many of the CD-Roms, which retail in the $40 to $55 area, are on sale in bigger, more mainstream outlets such as the Virgin Megastore and Wherehouse chains.

Most of the companies making the joystick flicks for CD-Rom are simply old-style porn film-makers moving into a new distribution area, but some are more intent on innovation and exploration.

"All successful technologies have passed through the pornography phase," says Paul Saffo, a researcher at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, near San Francisco. "M.ovies also went through this phase at the turn of the century."

Indeed, one of Thomas Edison's first films was called The Kiss. There are many early erotic photographs. And it didn't take long for printers to create love-making guides for popular consumption.

"If you look at the history of pornography and new technologies, the track record has been pretty good," Walter Kendrick, who wrote The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, told the Los Angeles Times recently.

"Usually everyone has come out ahead. The pornography people have gotten what they want, which is a more vivid way to portray sex. And the technology has benefited from their experimentation. The need for innovation in pornography is so great that it usually gets to a new medium first and finds out what can be done and what can't."

RON Wasserman is the president of Glowing Icon Publishing, the CD-Rom arm of a 15-year-old North Hollywood porn company. He went towards new technology 14 months ago and now has 18 titles available - "and they're selling just great".

Sixteen of the CDs are what he calls "linear titles", movies transferred to CD-Rom, with little more than the illusion of interactivity. "A lot of people do that," he says. "They just take the movies they've been putting out, make them into CD-Rom and sell them as digital movies.

"They do have some interactivity. You get to pick what to look at; you have about 16 controls - you can fast-forward, rewind, enlarge the screen, make it smaller, loop from one point to another, still-frame, that type of thing. It's got more controls than a standard adult CD-Rom because we do the programming ourselves, but they're not interactive," he says dismissively.

The other two, Virtually Yours and Virtually Yours II, excite him much more.

"We have 3-D rendered environments, worlds that you navigate through, corridors ... You get to choose which direction you go in. There are a number of doors and portals you go through, hot spots all over the place. It's like a game. Then you get into a large room we call the holodeck and your cyberhostess does a striptease, asking what you'd like her to take off."

Wasserman says CD-Rom has opened up new vistas for his business. He has added another company, Media Spin Interactive, a research and development entity working on the next generation of interactivity, trying to come up with a package which would allow the viewer's likeness to be scanned into the computer and attached to a 3-D model, "so you'd be watching yourself doing it".