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Pass the joystick

January 17, 2007

Now here's a headline, from today's New York Times, that begs for attention: "Is Live Sex On-Demand Coming to Hotel TVs?" You have to read it a few times before its meaning is fully disrobed.

Turns out that the next big thing, according to Gregory Clayman, proprietor of Video Secrets, which the Times describes as a "live-action company," is to sell "images of people having sex live over the hotels’ entertainment systems":

“We feel that live, right now, is coming of age,” Mr. Clayman said. “We are planning to make the jump to hotel rooms.” He said that as television sets and computers merge into the same appliance, he saw no reason that live action sex would not get a place in on-demand services in hotels. Some existing Web sites already allow customers to send text messages to direct the performers.

Now, I would have thought that reading text messages might be a little distracting under such circumstances, but I guess that's why they're professionals and I'm merely an amateur. Clearly, they're able to take BlackBerrying to a whole new level. Still, it's a very Web 2.0 idea. Instead of being passive consumers of blue movies, we can be active contributors to the content. We can be prosumers of porn, masters of our domain.

But will it scale? I mean, how many text messages will the performers be able to read and respond to at any given moment? It seems to me that if there were more than, say, three people sending in instructions, the whole thing would quickly devolve into a particularly ugly game of Twister. Maybe, though, you could have some sort of auction system. When you text in an instruction, you'd also include a bid, and only the highest bidder's message gets through.

Mr. Clayman's onto something here. I think by now we can all agree that the pleasures of the meatspace are best enjoyed through a liquid crystal display. As Marvin Gaye might have put it, were he alive today, "When I get that feeling, I need some on-demand live action."

Posted by nick at January 17, 2007 04:57 PM

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Comments

Collective Tumescence - the "best" suggestions, as voted by the audience, are used. :-)

But seriously, isn't this just the Phone Sex business model, except with video from the operator addition to audio? The idea seems that hotels will give them a dedicated channel for the video. OK, I see the concept, and maybe it works. But it hardly seems all that noteworthy.

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at January 18, 2007 12:11 AM

Pass the joystick

January 17, 2007

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