In order to put The Poken Company’s September 2021 PR campaign into orbit, we first sought to understand how the sex industry, over the decades, has brought technological innovations into our daily lives. In three chapters StoriesOut offers you a thematic insight into the history of PornTech.
- 92 billion porn videos were watched in 2016 on the YouPorn platform.
- France = 6th biggest consumers of these videos in the world
Between 2010 and 2016, humanity watched the equivalent of:
- 1.2 million years of pornographic videos
- + 100 billion page views per year on streaming sites
- 2% of Internet bandwidth for YouPorn and PornHub
For a long time now, the porn industry has been pushing technology forwards: from the minitel in the 1980s, developed thanks to its sex line service “3615 Ulla”, to the explosion of VHS tapes and VCR sales, to the rise of video stores, all of this was mainly thanks to porn.
Four decades later, it’s still porn that sells a lot of 3D TVs because many X-rated producers have been quick to bank on this technology. All the men who claim to buy their TVs for sport are not fooling anyone: it’s to “watch” 3D porn.
Over the century, the adult entertainment industry has popularized many technological innovations. After the minitel, card phone booths, the VCR, vibrators, online credit card payments, e-commerce, the DVDin the early 90’s and then Blu-Ray and MP3 10 years later, webcams and streaming: the way forward for porn in 2022 looks to be “cryptomania”.
Here’s whistlestop tour of innovations that first served the porn industry:
- 40 BC – First vibrator
- 1967 – Birth of the credit / debit card
- Late 1970 – Appearance in Europe of the phone card, proposed as an alternative to paying with coins in public phone booths, which are subject to vandalism.
- 1976 – Launch of the VHS format in Japanese markets, then in May 1978 in France (gradual disappearance around 2000)
- 4 June, 1982 – The PTT launches the marketing of Minitel to the general public
- 1990 –1990 – HD television is still operated in analog, by the European standard HD Mac in the image format 16/9 and 1 250 lines
- 1990 – The web makes an appearance
- 1991 – James Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky connect the 1st webcam to the department of computer sciences of the University of Cambridge so that the members of the computer science department can monitor the level of the coffee pot and thus avoiding having to get up and check) then connected to the Internet in 1993 and cut on 22 August, 2001
- 11 August 1994 – Phil Brandenberger, a Philadelphia resident, placed the first online order using a secure credit card payment system.
- 1995 – The French rented nearly 25 million movies per year from video clubs
- 2000 – Ericsson 380 launch the first phone presented as a smartphone with a large touch screen that can be covered with a keyboard
