Porn show overlaps with CES 2023

For the first time since 2011, the CES technology trade show ran simultaneously with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas this year.
The two shows used to share the Sands Convention Center. Back then, it was a common sight for CES attendees to see scantily clad women parading through the corridors on their way to the AVN show. The 2023 AVN show ran Jan. 4-7 at Resorts World Las Vegas.
The adult entertainment industry has been an early adopter and market maker for many consumer technologies, including home video, the commercial internet, and online payments. Today, porn is driving big sales for virtual reality headsets, according to Juniper Research.
I visited the AVN show on Friday evening Jan. 6 after working the CES conference to see if there was an interesting tech angle. I was thinking perhaps high-resolution VR or 8K video.
Unfortunately, this year’s AVN Show was more of a fan fest than a business conference. Dozens of adult actresses and actors met with fans and signed sexy portraits at booths that filled several conference halls. Many of the actresses were behind ring lights livestreaming their appearances at the show from platforms such as MyFreeCams. No nudity or explicit content was permitted at the show.
Brazzers announced a planned adult metaverse, called Joi.City, but that was about it for a new tech angle.
Maybe the tech and business angles have moved to the rival Xbiz Show, held Jan. 9-12 in Los Angeles.

Photos from 2023 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. (Patrick Seitz)

3-D porn is on the way

The adult entertainment industry is quick to respond to the latest news (consider the upcoming satire “Tiger’s Got Wood”) and technology (home video and the Internet). So it should come as no surprise that the porn industry is interested in 3-D TV.
At the Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 7-10 in Las Vegas, TV makers announced plans to roll out 3-D television later this year. They also plan to sell 3-D Blu-ray Disc players. Broadcasters, including ESPN and the Discovery Channel, announced plans for 3-D channels.
Over at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, which runs concurrently with CES, a San Diego-based company, Bad Girls in 3D, was hawking a 3-D entertainment package for $4,000. It includes a 60-inch 3-D HDTV, a media PC, proprietary software, two pairs of 3-D glasses and a monthly subscription for 3-D adult content streamed over the Internet.
The market for 3-D erotic video is not new, but has a limited history. The adult content produced in 3-D to date has been pretty bad, says Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of adult studio Vivid Entertainment.
In September, Pure Play Media released “Tommy Gunn's Cummin’ At You!” in 3-D on DVD.
Lance Johnson, a producer with Bad Girls in 3D, told PC World that the potential for 3-D adult entertainment was proven by the 1969 soft-core 3-D film “The Stewardesses.” Produced on a budget of just over $100,000, it went on to gross more than $27 million, according to Wikipedia.
Other 3-D movies of a sexual nature include “Love in 3-D” (1973) and “Emmanuelle 4” (1984).

My scene with porn star Raven Alexis

I went one-on-one with porn star Raven Alexis the other day.
I had the chance to interview her at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. What? You thought I meant something else?
Taking a break from the Consumer Electronics Show, I stopped by the AVN show to ask some executives for their thoughts on 3-D TV, living room video conferencing and other hot topics from CES.
At the Digital Playground booth I met Alexis, 22, who signed on with the adult movie studio last August. She’s a tech geek and a gamer so I thought I'd gauge her opinion of new technologies and other topics.

3-D TV

Alexis says she’s been told that Digital Playground is looking into making 3-D adult movies.
“I would hope that it would come soon. I really think that it could be amazing,” she said. “To bring a viewer into a porn that intimately and make them feel involved in it like that would be incredible.”
Producing a movie in 3-D also could help combat online piracy, she says. But production budgets would surely increase as well.
“What I’d really like to see is a holodeck from ‘Star Trek,’” she jokes.

The porn piracy problem

Alexis owns her own production company separate from Digital Playground and manages two Web sites with erotic content.
“Where I run into a problem as a business owner has been when people take my website content and they put it wherever and then I don’t see any proceeds,” she said. “Piracy is a huge problem.”

Video games

She has played “World of Warcraft,” the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, for six years and she’s quite good at it.
“People don’t even know who I am in the game. I remain anonymous,” Alexis said. “It’s more of just a way to relieve stress. There’s something very cathartic about going into the game and you have your big sword and you can beat people up and they don’t know you’re a girl, they don’t know you’re a porn star.”
She’s looking forward to the next expansion pack, “Cataclysm,” expected this summer from Blizzard Entertainment, a unit of Activision Blizzard.

Xbox games

Alexis also likes to play games on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console.
“With the recent scandal, it’s kind of funny, but I play “Tiger Woods Golf” a lot. I’m waiting now for the next version to have hookers come out and service you between rounds and then your wife beats you up,” she says with a laugh.
In addition to Electronic Arts’ “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10,” she plays EA’s driving game “Need for Speed: Shift.”
She bought the special bundle of Activision’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” with the night vision goggles, but was disappointed with the game. She completed the game in just three hours.

Her crossover dreams

“I really want to rise to the top of the industry. I want to do some work to break down stereotypes that exist between mainstream and the adult industry,” she said.
What are her goals?
“I want to do magazine covers. I want to do clothing lines. I want to do anything that allows mostly women, but in general, American audiences, to see that we’re normal people. We’re not scary. Sex isn’t scary. We don’t really do anything different than you or anybody else walking around here does. We just do it on camera, you know. It is very exciting and it is very empowering. I think if people realize that then that can make a big difference in how our society views sex.”
Much as I’d like to agree with her point about her not doing anything different than the rest of America, most of us aren’t having crazy hot three-way sex all the time.
Alexis sees fellow porn actresses Jesse Jane and Jenna Jameson as role models for their crossover success.
I mention Sasha Grey (star of Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 movie “The Girlfriend Experience”) and Alexis responds that she filmed a steamy scene with Grey in the upcoming Digital Playground movie “Fly Girls.”
“I play a security guard. And I’m supposed to be holding Sasha and Manuel Ferrara, a male performer … I’m supposed to be holding them in a cell, but unfortunately my lust takes over. I do other things other than holding them.”

Photos:
Top: Photo of Raven Alexis from Digital Playground
Bottom: Raven Alexis with a reporter at AEE 2010

“30 Rock” story line about porn video game ripped from the headlines

Last year on the critically acclaimed NBC comedy “30 Rock,” lunatic comic actor Tracy Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan, hit upon the idea to combine his two passions: video games and pornography.
The show parodied the movie “Amadeus,” portraying Jordan as a tortured artistic genius, while a jealous coworker played the Salieri role. Ultimately his porn video game was a huge success. On the show, that is.
The idea of a porn video game is nothing new. Others have attempted it, but they’ve pulled their punches when they realized the hurdles of getting distribution. They ultimately opted for a Mature rating, the video game industry’s equivalent of an R movie rating. The rating of Adults Only is the kiss of death for getting distribution for video games through traditional channels.
But now a startup company, D-Dub Software, is attempting to defy the odds. It’s produced a story-based adult video game, called “BoneTown,” where characters do drugs and engage in explicit sex.
The Albuquerque, N.M, company launched the game in October and has been slowly rolling it out. D-Dub promoted “BoneTown” at the Adult Entertainment Expo Jan. 8-11 in Las Vegas.
Andrew Hall, a.k.a. “Hod,” the chief executive of D-Dub, said the PC game has been in development for four years. But creating the game was easy compared with the difficulties of financing and distribution, he told me.
Venture capital firms were put off by the subject matter, so Hall used family connections to get funding.
D-Dub also couldn’t distribute the game in traditional video game outlets because they sell to kids. So it’s been selling the game in adult video stores. It also has been reaching out to the target market of men in their 20s and 30s through men’s magazines like Maxim and Playboy.
So far, “BoneTown” has been getting most of its sales in Europe, where people are less uptight about sex than in the U.S.
The main point of the game is to get players to laugh, Hall says. In an industry full of violent video games, humor is a rare commodity, he says.
Speaking of laughs, Hall was familiar with the “30 Rock” story line.
“It just points out that many people have seen the lack of this category of video games,” he said. “We made this game because it’s a game we wanted to play. We wished there was a video game like this out there.”

Porn video game on “30 Rock”

Tracy Jordan hatched his idea for the porn video game in season two, episode 13. The episode, called “The Uncanny Valley,” first aired on April 24, 2008, according to TelevisionWithoutPity.com.
Frank, a writer on Tracy’s show, says that the game is doomed to fail, just as past attempts have.

“History’s greatest perverts have tried: Walt Disney, Larry Flynt, the Japanese,” says Frank, played by Judah Friedlander.
But Tracy says he was born to invent a game where “characters get weird with each other for golden points. I’m like Mozart. You’re like that guy that was always jealous of Mozart.”
In season three, episode one, we find out that the video game was a huge success. The episode, “Do Over,” aired on Oct. 30, 2008. Again, thank you, TelevisionWithoutPity.com.
Tracy says the game, called “Dong Slayer,” sold 61 million copies at $60 each. He calls his video game “the most profitable thing since the war on terror.”

Look, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin at the porn show

The fact that the Consumer Electronics Show runs at the same time as the Adult Entertainment Expo is always fodder for jokes among CES attendees.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said company co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates gave him some advice for his first CES keynote speech.
“Bill said, ‘Make sure, Steve, you’re at CES, not that ‘other’ convention in Las Vegas,” he said in his Jan. 7 speech. Chuckle chuckle.
Yes, it is bizarre to see all the scantily clad, surgically enhanced women walking around the Sands Convention Center during CES.
I stopped by the 2009 Adult Entertainment Expo to ask some executives if the recession was hurting the porn industry. Short answer: not really. Sure, DVD sales are down, but business is shifting to the Internet.
Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild chief executive Joe Francis recently called for a $5 billion federal bailout of the adult entertainment industry. But they were really seeking publicity rather than federal funds.
Walking through the AEE exhibit area, I spotted the actress who got her 15 minutes of fame portraying Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in a porn movie called “Who's Nailin Paylin?”. The misspelled name apparently protects the producers, Hustler, from lawsuits. (TheSuperficial.com ran a clean clip from the movie. And let’s just say that Oscar won’t be calling.)
The actress (Lisa Ann) was dressed as the 2008 Republican candidate for vice president and was signing autographs and taking photos with fans.
I’ll bet she’s hoping Palin stays in the public eye. Sequel money, baby, sequel money.

Snip, snip, snip and an X-rated flick becomes a G-rated children’s movie

Major adult video studio Digital Playground has sold 500,000 copies of its X-rated adventure flick “Pirates,” which was released in 2005.
The sequel, “Pirate’s II: Stagnetti’s Revenge,” released last fall, is shaping up to be a record-breaking title for the Van Nuys, Calif., company, says Digital Playground Chief Executive Samantha Lewis.
Digital Playground describes “Pirates II” as the most expensive adult movie ever. It features lavish costumes and sets and over 600 special effects. It stars leading adult film actress Jesse Jane.
Like its predecessor, “Pirates II” has been edited for an R-rated version to be made available at Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and elsewhere, Lewis says.
In an interview at the 2009 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Lewis told me that the movies stand on their own without the hardcore sex scenes.
“We shot the movie and added the sex in,” she said.
In fact, Digital Playground even made a G-rated version of “Pirates” for the Japanese market, Lewis says.
Can you imagine loving some innocent movie as a kid, only to find out later that scenes actually climaxed in a whole different way?

Maybe there's an unedited version of “The Wizard of Oz” that I haven't seen yet.