This is typically repeated but I question if there is actual proof of it rather than one of those '8 glasses of water a day' which just keeps getting passed along or some kind of plausible and believable anecdote.
I don't know about formal studies, but I've read many an article (insert appropriate "reading for the articles" joke here) talking about how demand for porn influenced early adoption of most new forms of media:
printing, broadsheets, photos, different forms of film, and definitely computer video. (Here in Seattle I recall reading about some form of early adult film that shows up notably in local laws...some form of -scope, though I don't recall the name)
DVD-HD vs blu-ray? Adult industry influence was not small. When HD rolled around, the adult industries had notable influence. Where did the makeup techniques for dealing with such high def come from? Porn.
I think the comparison to the "8 glasses of water" standard might be off because unlike that, here no one is claiming a precise measurement, merely an observation of trends.
When the dust settled, perhaps, but I recall when the issue first came up in 2000 and just about every discussion argued technical merits...and where the porn industry was looking. Anecdotal data, but in 2000 streaming wasn't viable for the majority of users (and still remains not viable for a lot) so that's no reason to discount the impact in that arena.
Given the bandwidth porn has consumed since literally the beginning of the internet, I think it's fair to say that they can be credited with significant technology gains too.
As a recent (but maybe not too important) example, PH created hover-to-autoplay-gif for video thumbnails and then YouTube copied it.
Funny related story! At Reddit we built a tool to create thumbnails for webpages. The algo was basically find the biggest “squareish” image and then remove a row or column of pixels. The row/col was chosen based on which one left the image with the most entropy. We kept doing this until the image was a square.
That algo basically cuts off women’s heads and leaves just their cleavage.
Obviously we had to adjust it to try and avoid that, but even today you’ll see thumbnails on Reddit that are just cleavage.
I thought that a face would contain more entropy than two flesh mounds! Color me surprised. Could the algorithm be tweaked to favor removable from the bottom part of the image, since humans generally perceive from top to bottom? Most images contain the 'meat' at the top or middle, I'd assume?
Of course, along with the very-fucking-annoying Youtube Face [0]. It's so ordinary to mess with human psychology, anything to increase click through rates!
I can count the number of reaction videos I've seen on one hand but the YouTube face is all over my homepage.
The next iteration to this is out, it's using extreme Snapchat-esque filters to comically exaggerate the size of the eyes and mouth of a reaction face.
It's mesmerisingly disgusting, I wonder what the next steps are. More digital augmentation awaits?
I haven't dug deeply, but there seems to be a whole ecosystem. An open source avatar data format[0], full body motion capture software[1], this stuff integrates with standard 3d software environments such as unity/unreal/blender/maya/max. So does commercial software[2]. For the hardware it can be a simple web/phone camera on the low end (giving you a talking head) over camera + VR trackers + an iphone for the face sensor to high end rigs with multiple cameras and mocap suits.
I mean, there would be holodeck sex, but unless you're a teenage boy, you're not going to do that more than maybe twice a day max, and you're usually going to do it alone. After you get off, you do the same thing even teenagers do today with the internet: you start playing shooting/fighting games with all your buddies.
Another example is VR/remote control toys adoption - Mindgeek was pretty early adopter of VR porn and remote control toys with synchronization of video frames.
This is typically repeated but I question if there is actual proof of it rather than one of those '8 glasses of water a day' which just keeps getting passed along or some kind of plausible and believable anecdote.