Selling point No. 1? The crisp, clear quality of digital image and sound. The way the picture comes alive, the way the sound track seems as if it -- whoops! wait a minute, that's how mainstream studios are selling it. For porn producers, as for consumers, picture quality is secondary. What gets them excited about DVD is an arcane feature built into the new players -- the multiple-angle button, which lets viewers switch the perspective of a scene to any of up to four different camera angles. "A perfect tool for your cultivated voyeur," says Vivid's James. "It's a godsend for the adult industry."

He may be right. But if reports filtering back from retailers are to be believed, it's not just cultivated voyeurs who are picking up adult DVD titles for the angles. Plenty of customers are apparently buying DVD porn just to find out how that mysterious multiple-angle button on their player is supposed to work, since mainstream movie companies don't generally offer the option. "Scorsese and Coppola are not too crazy about letting Joe Six-Pack go, 'Oh, let's change the look of The Godfather,'" explains a Vivid exec. But porn producers, true to form, are only too happy to help people explore the uses of the new technology.

In the end, though, it's not going to be the multiple angles that make DVD porn take off. If adult titles ever come to dominate the DVD market the way they did early VHS, it will most likely be because they offer, potentially, the same thing videotape did: more privacy. PC-based DVD-ROM drives, as distinct from stand-alone DVD players, are just now becoming standard issue on new computers. And once they reach critical mass in homes and offices, a vast market of pornophiles will for the first time have the option of watching full-screen, hi-res adult video in the seclusion of their ergonomic workspaces.

But let's face it: if it's privacy they want, porn watchers are better off getting their viewing matter straight from the Internet, where they'll never have to skulk in the aisles of an adult-DVD section or face a bored salesclerk. That's one reason the smart money is on Net-based delivery systems to beat out all other adult media at the marketplace in coming years.

Another reason is hard numbers. Adult websites are a nearly $1 billion-a-year business. That's close to a tenth of the size of the sex industry as a whole, and with current annual growth rates of 20% to 30% showing no signs of abating, it will soon claim the lion's share. Those figures include income from a variety of sites, ranging from vast online photo archives to steamy chat rooms to e-catalogs for sex-toy merchants. But looming largest is a high-octane engine for growth known as "streaming video": the first, rough draft of the long awaited and much hyped convergence of television and the Internet.

"We've got the live feeds, the 24-hour strippers, but that's not really all that exciting. It's 'Been there, done that,'" says Danni Ashe, 31, creator, star and proprietor of Danni's Hard Drive, a subscription site that offers gigabytes of breast-centric cheesecake and grosses some $3.6 million a year. What Ashe really wants to be doing when the worlds of TV and the Internet collide is the same thing big boys like TCI and Time Warner want to be doi ng -- original, interactive, multichannel programming.

To be sure, the big boys aren't likely to be serving up programs like "The Audition," in which Ashe plans to let three or more amateur strippers compete for the instant votes of mouse-clicking viewers, with the winner receiving a cash prize as well as nude-modeling assignments. Nor will any established television executive be green-lighting the world's first interactive nude weather channel, for which Ashe has nabbed both a domain name (nudeweather.com) and an ad pitch ("Wouldn't you rather look at two beautiful women than Willard Scott?").

But that doesn't mean the media establishment shouldn't be paying close attention to Ashe and other Web-sex entrepreneurs now moving toward the broadband promised land. After all, the pornographers are probably going to get there first, and for fairly inexorable reasons. As one of the few business sectors on the Web consistently turning a profit, they've got the money to blow on the latest high-end webcasting equipment. They've got the incentive to blow it too, since their avid audience routinely repays even the crudest new-media experiments with phenomenal revenue. And so, once more, porn seems destined to lead the way into virgin technological territory, mapping it out like an advance scout for the armies of capital.