My sister has a portable DVD player, a small 7 inch screen DVD player. Really pretty nice, she loaned it to me when I was down there visiting her and my mom.

These things used to cost about 300-500 bucks but now at Costco, about $130 bucks will send one home.

Portable video is the rage. They have in dash car stereos with a slide out DVD screen, or those roof mounted ones you see in the big SUVs.

Every where you look someone is watching something in the strangest places. Camera phones stream video now, most laptops come standard with a player, and even video games like the Xbox and the PS2 play the movies.

And of course where you have movies, you have porn. In fact it wasn’t long ago a guy was driving his Mercedes down the street with not one but three DVD screens all playing porn. Pretty flipping clever, huh? He wasn’t quite smart enough to watch where he was going though, and drove too close to the police station, and got 3 misdemeanor charges for his efforts.

And it’s no shock, these things play normal movies, and the porn folks know where the market is. But something I read kinda makes me wonder who the market really is…..

The latest and greatest new toy in the video game world is the Sony PSP, a small portable game unit, with incredibly sharp graphics. It is also DVD capable, with special disk. I was skeptical about it when I found out it needed a small disk, thinking “well here comes another special format”. I needn’t have worried, Sony used the UMD or universal media disc format, making it fairly easy for movies to be ported to it. So I was glad to see several new movies advertised on TV tonight showing the PSP format availability.

But, where there is innovation, there is abuse. Can you guess what’s next?

Yep, PSP porn. The UMD format has made it easy for the porn distributors to size their disks down for the PSP. I read it tonight at Top Tech News and I cant say it surprised me. Take a look:

Pornography producers will soon release sexually explicit discs for Sony’s PlayStation Portable game console, most of whose users are minors.

Two makers of adult movies plan to sell their products for the console as early as July, and several other pornographers are apparently ready to follow, Japanese newspaper the Asahi Shimbun reported Friday.

“It is utterly undesirable, but we cannot stop software makers from selling such videos,” a public relations official at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. said.

The hand-held PlayStation uses the universal media disc, or UMD, format, enabling the console to play games or videos recorded on optical discs 2.3 inches in diameter.

The UMD format, developed by the Sony group, can play moving images for about 120 minutes. Much like the DVD, UMD discs can be produced and distributed by any company.

So Sony’s decision to make the movie format easy to use makes it easy to abuse. Seems odd to wish they had made it some propriatary format.

One really has to wonder if the porn moguls really expect that driving of a market. The article states the primary user is children, so is this an attempt to leave the door open to those adolescent boys (be honest, the porn industry caters mainly to males) in a wink-nudge kind of way, all the while assuring us that “no we only expect those adults who own them to buy the porn movies..” or do they figure that enough adults own these things to make it worth the effort? Maybe the college crowd, who knows.

I don’t have an answer really, and frankly its just another in a long list of easy access points to adult material that exist. I mean honestly, have we forgotten the internet for crying out loud? What adolescent male hasn’t done a little clandestine search for the forbidden warez. Sure, there are good kids out there, but curiosity and hormones are a tough combination. And frankly they don’t have to look. There are enough sites popping up where you don’t want them in Spam emails and spyware.

And I guess that’s just the world we live in. We live in the greatest technological age in history, and of course the porn industry is going to stay state of the art.

It almost makes one nostalgic to the good old days, when you had to hide your dirty magazines under the mattress…er…at least my friends did, certainly not me. Honest mom, not me…….