Private Magazine
Related: magazine - pornography
Profile
The first full color high quality pictures of explicit sex emerged out of Sweden in the mid '60s. Flamboyant car salesman Berth Milton began publishing Private Magazine in 1965, the first periodical in the world to legally show sexual penetration.
Private contrasted with the pattern of earlier publications whose covers promised much but delivered little. Issue two showed a close-up of a vagina. A man shows up in the next issue and by number nine Private shows full intercourse. The cum shot arrived with issue 14 in the summer of 1968. -- http://www.tranquileye.com/historyofporn/1966-74.html
Private Media Group, Inc.
Private Media Group, Inc. is a pornography company operating worldwide.
Private magazine was established in Stockholm, Sweden in 1965 as the world's first full-color hardcore sex magazine by Berth Milton Sr.. In the early 1990s, his son Berth Milton Jr. took over the company. Milton Jr. moved the company to Barcelona, Spain and modernized it with video and Internet content. In 1999, Private became the first adult entertainment company to be traded on the NASDAQ stock market; its ticker symbol is PRVT. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrivateMediaGroup [Oct 2004]
It's Tuesday night at the Bagdad, a porn palace in Barcelona. On a rotating stage, an assortment of costumed performers engage in sex in front of an audience of 20 or so, mostly men. Next door, Private Media Group, a Nasdaq-listed international pornster, uses Bagdad talent to stage live sex shows on the Web, 24 hours a day.
Here's how the digital version of the old peep show works: One of the 20 Privatelive.com Internet "artists" is naked on a couch, performing graphic acts for the wall-mounted Web camera. While she's feigning excitement, she discreetly taps a hidden panel that adjusts the camera's angle. She looks at the PC screen. Privatelive.com customers are simultaneously ogling her from the privacy of their homes and typing out messages to her. Their credit cards are getting charged a dollar a minute. There are only three on-line now, but Private Media says it can handle 1,000 such customers at any one time. One of the cybervoyeurs types into the chat room that he wants the porn actress to tweak her nipple. She obliges.
The Web-cam images are relayed at five frames a second from the basement in Barcelona to a satellite dish atop Private Media's headquarters in the city's suburbs. The satellite then sends the images across the ocean to the Internet's MaeEast backbone in Washington, D.C. and from there to customers in Chicago or London or Jakarta, via a high-speed connection.
[...]
No company is better positioned to take advantage of this new world than Private Media Group. Founded in Sweden in 1965, Private was the first legal porn magazine in the world. Berth Milton says the magazine's founder, his father, was a "freak" who had him selling hard-core 8mm pornography at the age of 11. Berth Milton swore off the business and went on to make money in the stock market and by building an electronics business in Sweden and a hotel in Spain. But he saw how Private was being run into the ground, and in 1991 he bought out his estranged father. Milton has since moved the company into everything from video to a Private label fashion line.
Private's kiwi-flavored lubricants and rubber panties are sold on hourlong infomercials in Europe, and its distinct brand of hard-core pornography, sold in 35 countries, is now accompanied by original soundtracks from pop stars like 3D (Massive Attack) and Liam Howlett ( The Prodigy). The company sponsors a U.S. Masters-standard pro golfer, attempting to create the image that pornography is part of a healthy person's lifestyle.
Private, which gets most of its revenue by licensing content to distributors around the world, has retained the rights to its 34-year catalog of pornography, making it the MGM archive of hard sex. Milton aims to exploit that archive digitally by charging Private's Internet customers a flat annual fee of $100 for access, plus $20 a month for a wide assortment of videos. Says Milton, "I can't see any problem in getting 2 million to 3 million people to pay $100 a year-that's without all the extra spinoffs."
Here's the irony: Even as pornography becomes more appallingly graphic, it is becoming more mainstream. Phone companies, cable companies, hotel chains and now investment bankers are all part of the act. It may be the ultimate case of defining smut-down. --Porn Goes Publichttp://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0614/6312214aprint.html
your Amazon recommendations