VHS, DVD's, satellite streaming & PPV, smart phones & 3G networking, and a large proportion of internet/comm tech (wave-div multiplexing, SSL, etc). According to this, Google's YouTube buyout was made possible by ad revenue from porn sites. Check out elrizzy's excellent reply (above) for more examples.

It's pretty crazy how in just ~15 years the internet has grown from IRC & AOL chatrooms with crude Perl bots to the db-driven tube sites & streaming cam communities of today. The Playboy Mansion just had girls and cameras; the Armory has an on-site fab shop, skilled videographers using Final Cut Pro, and multi-Gb data links that were streaming 1080i before the major news corporations had jumped on board with HDTV.