Although distribution of adult material over the wireless airwaves is gaining in popularity with consumers and becoming more profitable for adult entertainment companies, it probably will be several more years before U.S. cellular carriers find the financial rewards of disseminating hardcore content outweigh the risks. So say the folks at Decade Mobile, a relatively recent entrant in the wireless delivery facilitation field.
That doesn’t mean content owners should delay their plans to break into the sphere, according to Decade Chief Operations Officer Dean Newton. It simply means that, at least for the time being, hardcore content is best distributed via websites designed to be compatible with wireless access protocol (WAP). Billing, for the moment, is best accomplished via credit card or interactive voice response (IVR, similar to what some may remember as audiotext or “1-900” services).
Although U.S. carriers one day may join their European counterparts in distributing adult content from their own portals (or “ondeck”), a number of hurdles will keep that from happening in the near future, Newton says. A reliable age-verification scheme remains the number one impediment, followed closely by the lack of both a standardized content rating system and a shared way of determining what types of content should be rated.
What the adult entertainment industry – and everyone else, for that matter – tends to overlook, according to Newton, is that it’s not only sexually explicit material that worries the cellcos. “One of the problems when we talk about ‘adult’ is that it tends to take on a sexual connotation,” he says. Sexually explicit material is only one of the kinds of material the cellcos want to regulate, though: Violent games, explicit song lyrics, and especially text chat services run as much risk of offending conservatives and posing danger to minors as photos and videos of naked adults at play.
“Carriers and content owners are starting to work on a rating system now through the Wireless Internet Caucus,” Newton says, “but they’re only beginning to scratch the surface in that area.”
WIC is an operating division of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a trade group for carriers and content providers in the wireless space. WIC’s objective is “to accelerate the growth of the wireless data ecosystem in the United States. It also serves as a rallying point for wireless Internet companies on public policy issues of importance to the wireless community,” according to its mission statement.
Most European carriers seem to have solved the underage access problem with varying degrees of success almost two years ago, but cellcos in the U.S. are moving slowly because of the conservative climate hanging over much of the North American continent. “It’s a huge problem if children get access to content they shouldn’t see, so they’re doing their best to ensure they’ve dealt with all the potential legal issues” before they open up their systems, Newton says. It’s not that the carriers don’t want the content, he continues; it’s more that they have a healthy respect for the legal system and society’s very vocal religio-conservative element. The wrong eyes or ears lighting on decidedly unconservative material “could give the branded channel a gigantic black eye,” Newton says.
Two of the areas in which Decade has an overriding interest are 18 U.S.C. §2257 and the somewhat ambiguous nature of U.S. obscenity law.Saran Ganesh, Decade’s mobile director of products and programming, recently noted, “Both the biggest opportunity and challenge in the [adult entertainment] market is legal compliance and age verification. A number of our competitors are turning a blind eye to Section 2257 and regional obscenity issues. Given today’s legal environment, they run the very real risk of getting themselves – or worse yet, their content partners – in serious trouble. Distribution, production, billing, and legal compliance are critical to a successful mobile strategy.”
Newton says although his company is as dissatisfied with and confused about the new 2257 regulations as anyone else in the industry, it has decided to play it safe and collect 2257 documentation from the clients for whom it distributes content. “Obviously we have serious legal reservations about the secondary producer component of the regulations, and the punitive provisions of the regulations are outrageous, but we’re going to take a conservative approach to them” until Free Speech Coalition vs. Gonzales provides some sort of definitive answer, he says. “Frankly, any company that is a serious player in this space should have been maintaining that documentation all along.”
As for the notorious variations in obscenity law between the states: “Interstate transmission of adult content is another giant issue,” Newton says. “We’re working to find ways to break up our content by regional areas. We intend to deploy solutions that will break up what can and cannot be distributed in certain regions.”
Kathee Brewer, who uses her cell phone only in stealth mode out of deference to the prudes in her region, is editor at large for AVN Online. Send your mobile news and questions to her at [email protected].
