Dial "P" For Porn
	Will mobile-phone pornography be the wireless industry's dirty little secret?
	By BRUNO GIUSSANI

Posted Sunday, April 6, 2003; 17:21 BST
Nick White is the only executive who dares say out loud what the whole wireless industry is thinking: "Sex represents a big revenue opportunity. We would be naive to ignore it." White heads the "value-added services" team at Virgin Mobile, and one of his tasks is to develop new offerings that exploit the profit potential of upcoming features of wireless networks and devices — more bandwidth, larger color screens, better audio capabilities and zippier microchips that can run video clips.

Every mobile operator is looking at fresh ways to sell more phones and generate badly needed revenue. The one service that everyone is ogling is pornography, uh, I mean "adult entertainment," or "pink content," as it is also called. While everybody is working on it — designing strategies and signing agreements with the likes of Playboy Enterprises and Private Media Group, two of the largest companies in the pornography-publishing business — for now, only the brave will actually admit it.

"Porn is an embarrassment for the mobile industry," says Alan Reiter, president of Maryland-based consultancy, Wireless Internet and Mobile Computing. Operators are hesitant to tie their names too closely to it, for moral or legal reasons, or just because it might tar the brand. But the potential is too big to ignore. If third-generation (3G) phones take off the way operators expect, then porn could represent as much as €3.7 billion in revenues by 2006, according to British research firm Visiongain.

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