Dirty Downloads Ready to Go on IPods

Missy Suicide poses with an Apple iPod and her website SuicideGirls.com on a computer in the background in her office, Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, in Los Angeles. The women at SuicideGirls.com, an online social network of pinup girls, are expanding into 3-5 minute video clips, a new direction. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) (Mark J. Terrill - AP)

Creative Technology and iRiver are among companies with pocket-sized devices already on the market; they use Windows Mobile software to display video, audio and still images.

In addition, one early entrant, Archos, has a Jukebox that can store and play a whopping 400 hours of video in the MPEG-4 standard.

Yet the very marketing and deal-making finesse that helped Apple rise to dominate the portable music market make its new video-playing iPod a likely vessel for adult movies' expansion to portable porn.

The Apple's iTunes online story already features several hot and heavy podcasts, audio downloads geared to portability. The company isn't offering much in the way of sex on videos, though some of the music videos it sells for $1.99 each can tend toward titillation. Apple officials refused requests for interviews on whether they might offer adult content on iTunes for iPod owners.

For many high-profile companies, sex remains a tough sell.

Although wireless phone companies support devices that play video, they are reluctant to expose themselves to complaints from a large and valuable customer base.

One company that knows firsthand is Digital Orchid, which manages the delivery of streaming video to cell phones for top brands, including MLB.com, NASCAR.com, ESPN and the National Hockey League.

It also handles Hawaiian Tropic, the suntan oil company perhaps better known for its comely bikini models. That sort of content is about as racy as wireless carriers want to get, says Robert Betros, Digital Orchid's co-founder and chief technology officer.

"We won't cross that line because the carriers won't distribute it, and that's a majority of the revenue opportunity for us," Betros said. "Now they may change their tune, and in some places in Europe carriers are distributing this kind of content."

In the wireless industry, carrier-approved content exists within something referred to as a walled garden. In the United States, at least, that garden is generally safe for children.

Once users stroll outside garden walls and inside a Web browser, however, all bets are off.

A company called Xobile sells pornographic video clips for cell phones. No special operating system or other software is necessary: Just a Web browser, which is commonplace now for phones with access to digital data networks.

That it's now easier than ever for minors to view X-rated content on portable devices concerns media watch groups that seek to protect children.

The problem is that children are often quicker to grasp the technology than their parents, says Jack Samad, a senior vice president with the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families.

"The arena is wide open, unfiltered, unrestricted, for adult content," Samad said. "Children are very aware of where it is and how to download it."

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Associated Press Writer Gary Gentile in Los Angeles contributed to this report.