Soon, you’ll probably be able to watch all the content you want, even live streaming video, in high definition on a wireless box. But you’ll definitely be able to do all that even sooner if you’re watching porn.
This is another example of the porn industry pushing technology, according to Estefano Isaias Jr., CEO of FyreTV, the company that built the equivalent of a porn-specific AppleTV that actually works. Isaias said he’s working on a new version of the box, that will be the first ever wireless box to stream live video in high def. He claims that he’s doing it because of his rapport with customers.
This is par for the course, he says, and unlike a company like Apple, FyreTV is “a small fast, agile company with very low overhead. We don’t need to have 12 million subscribers in order to be profitable.” The trade-off is that they do have to meet the demands of their fewer but extremely devout consumers, and demanding they are.
Recently they reported some technical issues with the remote, which has had to be redesigned twice. “Our second remote is better than our first remote,” Isaias says, “and our third remote is going to blow it out of the water.” This past January, Fyretv nixed the cable hookup because users wanted to watch porn in their bedrooms, and the cord trailing from the living room to the box was “raising some eyebrows.”
And the next porn-pioneered frontier? Storing content further away from the home, centralized in a crowd. More and more, distributors will be able to alter content without going through the middlemen required to move a physical product, says Isaias. That seems to be the general trend, and while many people certainly reject that the porn industry significantly affects technology (see Wired commentary in 2007), others, like Isaias, maintain that nothing motivates nerds like sex.
