What is touted as the first-ever Mobile Adult Content Congress for the United States is coming to Miami January 24–26, 2006.
That's the word from Black Marlin Multimedia Group Inc., which said announcing the congress that the primary focus would be "responsible delivery" of adult mobile content as it applies to carriers, content providers, aggregators, webmasters, venture capitalists, equipment manufacturers, Internet service providers, and software providers and developers.
Playboy Online vice president Victor Penev and Vodafone director of community and content standards Tina Southall are the scheduled keynote speakers. The gathering will address such topics as mobile operators' role in responsible adult content delivery, protection children from inappropriate content, business models for adult mobile content selling and distribution, regulatory concerns, current and future projected adult mobile revenues, defining boundaries and rating adult mobile content, aggregate and third-party content providers' roles, and more.
Congress organizers could not be reached for comment before this story went to press, but Juniper Research has estimated the world adult entertainment market is now worth between $31billion to $75 billion, with the adult mobile market in the United States likely to be worth $2.1 billion by itself by 2009.
"We believe that the number of users who do elect to download paid-for adult content via SMS will grow across the board until 2009, when – with basic text-based services increasingly superseded by rich-media content – there is a drop-off in numbers in the European market," said Juniper analyst Windsor Holden in a white paper on adult mobile content published earlier this year.
"In Asia, despite the numerous regulatory issues, the services will experience strong growth so that numbers will increase more than fivefold over the period," Holden continued. "In terms of usage, quite clearly figures will be skewed slightly by the minority who are addicted to “dirty talk” and chat services, but, generally speaking, we expect usage levels to decline over time, although we anticipate that average usage will increase in the short term in some countries [such as the U.S. wherein the phenomenon has yet to take hold."
