Jobs' solo Flashturbation lent unlikely second hand

Pr0n makes strange HTML5 bedfellows

The puritanical Steve Jobs has won an unlikely ally in his campaign to kill Flash: the very porn industries he's blocked from the iPad and iPhone.

Digital Playground, one of the porn industry's biggest players in the US, has said it'll dump Flash and deliver online video using HTML5 as soon as desktop browsers provide "full" support.

Ali Joone, founder and director of Digital Playground, is reported to have called HTML 5 "the future" saying it's a simple matter of, ahem, "exposure" as to when HTML5 wins over Flash.

"We are waiting for browsers to catch up. As soon as they are ready, we will move everything to HTML5," Joone told Conceivably Tech. "It's the next passing of the torch."

HTML 5 should give adult entertainment from Digital Playground, and others, a big leg up on the iPhone. Steve Jobs has blocked most porn from the iPad — at least via the App Store. A purge of more than 5,000 App Store apps removed most porn in February.

HTML 5 would put porn in the browser and mean that vids such as Janie Summers: Girl Next Door would not rely on Flash, also blocked by Jobs from playing on the iPad.

Twenty-six percent of all web video is available using HTML5 — specifically, the HTML 5 <video> tag and the H.264 codec. Browsers that currently support HTML5 video are Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari but not Microsoft's more widely used Internet Explorer

Digital Playground claims 40 per cent of the US adult DVD market, and backed Blu-ray over HD-DVD early on, before that format was settled.

Porn in general is a big driver of online traffic and it's helped drive uptake of technology before. During the 1970s and 1980s, makers of pornographic films were early adopters of the then-new videotape technology. With the arrival of Debbie Does Dallas there was no turning back for the videocassette and player combo.

The porn industry could again help consolidate a new technology, if others follow Digital Playground and jump in bed with HTML5. It has been calculated that 12 per cent of all web sites are porn, a quarter of all search-engine requests are for porn, and just over a third — 35 per cent — of all downloads are pornographic. ®