In the adult industry, there’s also more room to experiment because there’s far less money at stake than at a major studio. "The mainstream studios are only putting out a handful of movies each year, and they each cost a lot of money," Asher said. "Every hit is fantastic, every bomb is devastating for them. But an adult company puts out 80 movies a year. If we want to add a little money to try something, it’s okay. It’s not going to be devastating no matter what we do."

Could the adult film industry one day face a Napster-style crisis? Asher says movie pirating is already a problem in the adult biz. "If you go to these sites that have video sharing, the number-one product on the site is adult," he said. "And the number-one brand of adult that’s being shared, or stolen if you will, is Vivid. So it’s always been a big issue for us."

Indeed, illegal downloading of pornographic movies is rampant, perhaps much more so than PC game and movie piracy. But many in the adult entertainment industry don’t feel it’s a death sentence for the business.

"Our take on it is a little more like independent bands think," Asher continued. "Until these sites get shut down, we’d rather there be Vivid content on there. Let people get a taste for our movies. For us, it’s good advertising. With adult, remember we’re putting out a new movie every four days, so what you pirate today will be out of date four days from now."

Without porno, would we have had our VCRs, DVD players and Internet? Of course. The porn business is a thought leader when it comes to technology, but they’re not inventors. Still, the adult entertainment industry has helped blaze a trail for those advancements. "The Internet would have happened with or without the adult industry, but there’d be a lot less computers hooked up to it," Asher said. "With the VCR, you could certainly [speculate] that maybe it never would have caught on. Maybe it wouldn’t have gotten up to speed to the critical mass it needed. More than likely it would have happened; it just would have happened more slowly."

Digital Playground’s 2005 hit "Pirates" is on DVD and HD-DVD, but the studio is now looking at Blu-ray because of the PlayStation 3’s install base .

So where will the business go with Blu-ray and HD-DVD? Initially, many porn studios gravitated toward HD-DVD because it was deemed cheaper and easier to use by many studios. However, Blu-ray has made a comeback in recent months. Ironically, the next-generation video game consoles may have a significant impact on which direction the adult industry takes. For example, All Adult Channel gives customers the option of downloading movies to their Xbox 360s. Meanwhile, Digital Playground has reportedly embraced Blu-ray because of the format’s larger disc capacity and because the studio feels the PlayStation 3 will offer a larger installed customer base. Other studios, however, don’t care for either high-definition format, feeling the extreme digital detail offered by the formats is more than customers want for their adult films.

Whatever the case, the adult entertainment industry will undoubtedly continue to innovate and look to be ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. "The industry jumped dramatically from theatre to VCR, and subsequently jumped dramatically as it went to cable," Asher said. "Obviously now with the Internet, it’s doing it again. Whenever the adult industry adopts a new technology, the business goes up several multiples."

Rob Wright contributed to this report.