Now Coming to a Cell Phone Near You: Porn & Crime   8/5/2005 - 5,046 views,

Ok, now convergence isn’t anything new. Heck, it was going on way before every man, woman and child was carrying a portable device (see here for my rant about cell phones for children). Witness, for example, the fact that I can get my prescription refilled while shopping for a DVD player at the grocery store, and buy furniture at the pharmacy.

But just how far are we going to push this convergence thing?

Apparently all the way.

Announcements have been made this week, by a variety of companies, which all lead to this:

You can now watch porn, or real ongoing criminal trials, whenever you like, on your cell phone.

To tune in to what’s going on in the hallowed halls of justice, cell phone users will be able to connect to a feed from Court TV. Says Claire Cowart of Court TV, “With the growth of the mobile video services over the past few years, this is a perfect outlet for Court TV to extend our brand and attract audiences that we might not have been able to reach in the past. This service provides unlimited access to Court TV’s original programming and content, and will give our audiences another platform to utilize. We feel that this is the first step in exploring different outlets for Court TV as we move forward with the new vision of the network.”

Not so much into true-life crime? Porn more to your liking? Your cell phone can deliver that to you, too.

Xobile, a division of the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, provides 2-minute video clips, excerpted from longer adult-content movies, and will deliver them right to your 3G-enabled cell phone.

“We have demonstrated that we’re not only the first in the U.S., but we’re the fastest,” said Harvey Kaplan, head of Xobile, adding that “We believe that video content delivered over mobile devices is in its infancy and it will grow rapidly.” That’s probably not the only thing.

The U.S. isn’t alone in this endeavor. It was recently announced by the Private Media Group of Spain that European cell phone users will also be able to get porn to their phones.
However, not all countries are enthralled with these developments. Lawmakers in Cambodia are calling for a crackdown on the ready transmission of pornography to cell phones, sparked by a new craze in which photos of young female stars, doctored to make them look naked, are being transmitted from teen to teen by their cell phones.

Said a spokesperson for Cambodia’s Women’s Affairs ministry, “The increase in the distribution of the pornographic pictures to youth has severely affected the value, honour and dignity of Cambodian women and family, social, cultural and Khmer traditional values.”