Courtesy of FastCompany.com

BY Kit EatonMon Feb 22, 2010

iPad Porn

Apple can posture and ban sexy iPhone apps and Suicide Girls all it wants. Come March, porn will help the iPad rock. Here’s why.

Like it or love it, there’s no denying the power of Internet porn. If you’re a worker in the TV, video, or computer industry, it’s one of the key drivers behind some of the tech you use on a daily basis. Remember the famous tape format battle between VHS and Betamax (the technically superior system)? VHS’s convenience for porn producers’ partly resulted in it becoming the dominant video system. Widespread adoption by the porn industry also helped Blu-ray’s success over HD-DVD.

Its laser-like focus on cash has given porn an edge in technology development history. And it’s a business that’s always looking for new and novel ways to deliver its product through systems that appeal to its consumers–the one who gets there quickest gets the biggest share of the booty. Pornographic Web sites test drove online payment systems as ways to make quick bucks while everyone else bit their nails and waited years for PayPal. Broadband crushed slow dial-up in part due to users’ hunger for speedy, sexy data…porn. Going back further, porn was thriving at the dawn of cable TV and photography itself. One of the first popular uses of the printing press was to publish pornographic writing and imagery.

Today it’s a multi-billion dollar industry powered by the human psyche and high technology. It’s hard to put a finger on it precisely, but the U.S. porn industry alone is probably worth a long way north of $10 billion per year. Remember the famous adage: “If all the porn was clensed from the Internet, then there’s just be a single Web site in the world. It would say–’bring back all the porn!’” Porn has always been with us, and probably always will in one form or another.

Even on Apple’s iPad.

READ MORE