In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way

In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way It was just days after the release of the iPad -- Apple's slate computer heralded as a tool for gaming,Fish oil softgel book and magazine reading and Web consumption -- when the announcement arrived.

One of the world's biggest porn companies claimed it had created a way to stream its videos onto the device, skipping the Apple store and its restrictions on salacious content.

The announcement illustrates a widely acknowledged but seldom-spoken truth of the technology world: Whenever there's a new content platform, the adult-entertainment industry is one of the first to adopt it -- if they didn't help create it in the first place.

"It's not necessarily that the porn industry comes up with the ideas, but there's a huge difference in any technology between the idea and the successful application," said Jonathan Coopersmith, a professor at Texas A&M University who teaches the history of technology.

"They're kind of the shock troops, and one of the nice things for them is that they can claim, 'Hey, I'm advancing technology.' "

While the shadowy nature of the adult-entertainment industry makes exact figures hard to nail down, it's generally acknowledged that porn was the first product to make money on the Internet and still rakes in upward of $1 billion annually online.

From the printing press to instant cameras, from pay-per-view to VCRs,Fish oil softgel pornographers -- both professional and private -- have been among the quickest to jump on board with newly developed gadgets.

The first public screening of a movie was in 1895. Less than two years later, Coopersmith notes, the first "adult" film was released.

"The classic example is the VCR," said Oliver Marc Hartwich, an economist and senior fellow with Centre for Independent Studies, a conservative Australian think tank. "When it was introduced, Hollywood was nervous because the big studios feared piracy. They were even considering suing the VCR producers.

"Not so the adult industry. They saw it as a big new market and seized the opportunity."

On the internet, streaming video, credit-card verification sites, Web referral rings and video technology like Flash all can be traced back to innovations designed to share, and sell, adult content.