Cellular telephones have gone from a rich man's plaything to a mass-marketed convenience to all but a portable minicomputer…and, just as it did on the VCR and the traditional desktop computer, porn is proving a popular part of the experience. And it's an experience major cell phone carriers observe with ambivalence, with some rejecting and some warily inching toward it, according to a number of published reports.
Cingular Wireless, for example, said in December that they would quit offering customers options of downloading fully-clothed porn star images, something AT&T Wireless had offered before Cingular bought that service two months earlier. "We're not going to offer adult content; we're not going to offer ultraviolent games," said Cingular spokesman Mark Siegel to reporters. "That is not compatible with the Cingular brand."
"Such decisions," said the New York Times, "show the fine line the carriers are trying to walk. Many, for example, already offer downloadable images of bikini-clad models from magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Maxim. But some critics are raising concerns that the phone operators are acting as content gatekeepers."
Smaller cell phone carriers, by contrast, seem a little more accepting of racy adult material downloadable to the cell phone, particularly since the Federal Communications Commission has said in the past that cell phone carriers can't censor what their customers visit on the Internet through their phones. The FCC has also said no rule covers what the carriers could sponsor or sell themselves.
Sexy ringtones and screen savers have joined the sexy pictures as part of the cell phone experience, particularly in Europe and Asia, where—for example—Playboy Enterprises has been offering images of Playmates somewhat successfully, now planning to make similar offerings plus sexy ringtones (or moan tones) to certain American cell phone customers.
Forrester Research telecommunications analyst Charles S. Golvin told reporters a major Nordic cell phone carrier, whom he didn't identify, said 40 percent of its customers' known Internet searches on cell phones were for adult content. And Los Angeles-based Waat Media—who adapt images and video to cell phones for top line adult producer Vivid Video—says 200,000 European cell users were accessing that content monthly.
Among the major carriers, Sprint offers images of bikini models from mainstream magazines but not adult publications or providers, even though the company admits the bikini images aren't that much different from Playboy or adult film images in which the models or actresses are covered in certain places.
"A Playboy brand or Penthouse brand - those do not meet our requirements," Sprint spokeswoman Mary Nell Westbrook told the Times. "Sports Illustrated and Maxim do."
And even the small carriers who lack the majors' odd ambivalence seem a little edgy about carrying even muted adult content. "One of the biggest fears of the wireless carriers," Yankee Group telecommunications analyst Roger Entner told the paper, "is that—with a more conservative United States—the Southern Baptist conference or some such group would boycott them."
