Will porn affect the outcome of the format war?
It is well accepted that whatever technology the porn industry adopts becomes widely accepted, and there is little doubt that it helped VHS and the Internet. However is the next generation pre-packaged media really that new? Certainly not as much of a breakthrough as the Internet or pre-packaged media like VHS. When VHS first hit the street it was the first time someone could enjoy movies in the comfort of their own home whenever they wanted. With the Internet people could download what they wanted when they wanted and they didn't even have to go to the store and risk being spotted to buy it. When DVD came out it added special features and instant access to scenes, but other than the great picture quality, what do the next gen formats offer in regards to porn? Sure PIP might be nice, as well as better sound, but no doubt it isn't as big of an increase so will the porn industry have the same impact. This pretty much sums up why you don't see much next gen porn news on Engadget HD, we simply don't think that one studio announcing titles on one format or another is big news, although it might be if it were the biggest name in porn, but Vivid still says they will produce on both formats and the BDA has even issued a statement saying they don't have a problem with porn.Read: Blu-ray: We Like Porn, Too
Read: HD DVD or Blu-ray? Even the Porn Industry Won't Touch It
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
hmurchison @ Jan 19th 2007 7:12PM
No it won't hurt HD DVD clearly but Porn hasn't the same influence that it did during the Beta/VHS wars as the only way to get porn then was magazines and sleazy movie theatres. Now you have the internet, DVD rental, mail order rental, Cable TV etc. Not the same factor. Nowadays you don't have to look for porn...it comes looking for you.
Keith @ Jan 19th 2007 7:42PM
I think anyone who thinks that Porn on HDDVD is going to win over the likes of Disney, Fox, and all the other studios who are Blu Ray exclusive either already bought an HDDVD player and are scared to have a paperweight, or never bothered to learn that coincidence does not imply causality.
Ryan J. @ Jan 19th 2007 8:02PM
I think the only true indicator of who is winning the format war is going to be when one or more movie studios adds support or jumps to the other side.
hmurchison @ Jan 19th 2007 8:32PM
Yeah I'll believe Vivid when I see them deliver. They've gone from "We're going to ship Blu-ray first" to "Both HD DVD and Blu-ray will ship simultaneously" my guess is next we'll read "HD DVD version of our movies will be shipping in xxx month"
If Digital Playground and Wicked Pictures are having issues getting their stuff replicated then I doubt that Vivid is going to just waltz in and get the hook up.
Porn will help HD DVD get into homes however. You don't have to buy them as there will likely be places renting them. Who's going to turn down Club Jenna? I suggest they put scratch and sniff stickers on the HD DVD packaging. tsk
Phoenixxx1974 @ Jan 20th 2007 12:00PM
during the AEE (adult entertainment expo) Sony has said NO porn on blu-ray and a guy from vivid was interviewed and said sony has blocked them from producing porn on blu-ray while HD-DVD is happily welcoming them. So alot of porn companies are ditch blu-ray for HD-DVD also for the fact that it's easier and cheaper to produce and have combo formats for both DVD/HD-DVD. But vivid claims they are still trying to release both formats.
Plus japan already has the very first porn title in HD-DVD.
Here is an article, from as recent as yesterday, that the headline says:
Sony says 'no' to porn on Blu-ray Disc
Analysts say Blu-ray could lose format battle to HD DVD because Sony will not handle adult film titles
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/19/HNnopornonbluray_1.html
Ben Drawbaugh @ Jan 20th 2007 1:14PM
The first HD DVD porn titles in the US are already available too, the box art pictured is one of them. You can order them now from adultdvdempire.com which is where I got the box art from.
Phoenixxx1974 @ Jan 20th 2007 1:46PM
pirates is not a real HD-DVD. Pirates is a regular DVD-ROM with a 720p HD WMV file on it, playable only with a PC or a device capable with that sort of thing. Pirates WILL NOT play back on a true HD-DVD player.
http://www.hdtvtotal.com/module-pagesetter-viewpub-tid-1-pid-775.html
Pirates XXX WMV-HD-DVD
Slave Room is touted as the REAL first HD-DVD.
http://www.dvd-recordable.org/Article2905.phtml
If you know of a REAL HD-DVD to be the first american one let me know i think it would be cool to order and say i have the very first american porn in HD-DVD hehe. Mght be a collector's item later on.
Ben Drawbaugh @ Jan 20th 2007 1:55PM
They have Pirates HD DVD available for pre-order and others available now and no not the WMV versions.
Phoenixxx1974 @ Jan 20th 2007 1:59PM
interesting.
thanks for the info. I haven't seen that anywhere. I have heard of the slave room one because it's the world first which came out like a couple months ago.
Do you think this will help HD-DVD and hurt blu-ray?
Ben Drawbaugh @ Jan 20th 2007 2:01PM
I don't think it will effect either much, unless there are more HD DVD porn titles available than Blu-ray titles.
I think must will still prefer the Internet as their man delivery method for porn.
Ken @ Jan 20th 2007 5:16PM
So if Sony starts making porn, would they release it on BD or HD-DVD?
Ron @ Jan 20th 2007 8:40PM
"I think the only true indicator of who is winning the format war is going to be when one or more movie studios adds support or jumps to the other side."
This is the best point. With Universal not releasing any HD-DVD's and with rumors of an expired contract regarding an exclusive content deal. I think there are quite a few people that smell what is in the wind. Especially considering the two other HD-DVD exclusive providers have jumped ship...... one even created a TotalHD disk didn't they??
bobbydr2000 your right about beta 100%. I remember it as well. It's nice to see sony has LEARNED from there mistakes of the past. This time we won't have to sacrifice quality for quanity(it's lookin good for the quality to be the quanity). Especially considering my 60' SXRD (1080p input) looks hot playing BD on my PS3.
Joseph R @ Jan 23rd 2007 4:20AM
"Especially considering the two other HD-DVD exclusive providers have jumped ship...."
Well, apparently you are not aware that another "exclusive HD-DVD supporter" is THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY [who created and owned Miramax until they sold it for major MILLION$ to Disney].
That's right, Weinstein is dilberately NOT supporting Blu-ray with their growing catalog of films!
Just yesterday I picked up the Weinstein release "CLERKS 2" (Kevin Smith) on HD-DVD [2-disc special edition], at my local Best Buy, and used their "price-matching" guarantee to get it for only $17.99 [per Fry's Electronics adv.], LESS another 10% off with a coupon [since I'm a BBuy cardholder].
So, along with Universal, all Weinstein product [with Genius Entertainment] will appear on high-definition disc ONLY on the superior HD-DVD format.
And don't forget the huge European and Japanese support for HD-DVD! Many of the so-called "Blu-ray" exclusive titles here in the USA, can be purchased now (and in the future) on HD-DVD from Amazon's France website, yesasia.com (Japan), xploitedcinema.com (USA), and others.
Titles like the 3-film "RAMBO Trilogy" [NOT even out on Blu-ray from Lionsgate yet!], "T2" [pre-order just announced], "TOTAL RECALL", "XXX" (Van Diesel), "BASIC INSTINCT", "THE GRADUATE", "REIGN OF FIRE", "LEAVING LAS VEGAS", "THE FOG" etc.
How long will Sony, Fox, Lionsgate, and Disney support "Blu-ray only", when the growing HD-DVD base can easily buy many of their titles on HD-DVD from a growing import market?
Within another year or so, there will easily be well over a million HD-DVD players [includes XBox 360 add-on drive] in use, also computer drives, and a fast-growing world-wide market since the Chinese will soon offer lower-cost players in '07, along with those by ONKYO, MERIDIAN, LITE-ON, RCA, HP, TOSHIBA and perhaps [rumours] another MICROSOFT player!
You will see that HD-DVD will be the main format that ordinary consumers will grow attached too, because the overall hardware/software/production costs are lower than Blu-ray. (and of course, the image and sound quality are superior over Blu-ray in my opinion)
bobbydr2000 @ Jan 21st 2007 9:05AM
I've read all over the news that porn decided the format wars. Um, not exactly. I was in the video industry when this was all going on and we offered a substantial selection of betamax porn. The problem was that too few of our customers (by a 3 to 1 margin) actually had a betamax. What actually happened was this: Matsushita (AKA JVC) was late to enter the home video system market by six months. Just like today, acceptance of the new technology was slow because of lack of content, with the bulk of the sales taking place on the west coast (port of entry) and spreading thinly east. Beta had a huge jump on VHS but Sony REFUSED to license the beta to other component manufactures (To ensure quality control (read: for overconfidence of their superior system and, well, greedy reasons). Matsushita on the other hand, let anybody put the VHS logo on their own machine as long as they paid a license fee. Once VHS labeled machines hit the market, they descended all at once, from every direction. In NYC at the time, you could go into a store like Crazy Eddies, have a choice of two Betamax machines, or choose from 10 different VHS models all with different features. The news at the time was all about the superior beta, but the consumer found that he could get a machine with more features at a lower price if he sacrificed some quality quality that hardly noticeable on the TV monitors to a layman in the first place. The content problem was still there, and thats where porn saw its opportunity. Within 3 years time, porn houses popped up everywhere with banks of hundred of VHS machines churning out content. The lists they sent us overwhelmingly outnumbered the selections available from Hollywood. So yes, porn helped the sale of video tape tremendously, but if Sony had not made what is possibly the biggest marketing error in history, we probably would have Betamax video recorders moldering in our garages today.
riverside_guy @ Jan 21st 2007 11:17AM
Funny, I seem to read a lot of "porn won the war for VHS over beta" nonsense. What I remember is that it very much "validated" the concept of the VCR itself, not which format eventually prevailed. I always thought that the longer recording times and the whole rental market was more a determinate in the VHS win, along with the fact that quality meant zip to most folks (hell, S-VHS absolutely had better quality than beta, yet remained always a tiny, tiny niche).
I could be wrong, but I think the adult industry had those wmv HD via DVD titles out over 2 years ago.
Ben Hobbs @ Jan 21st 2007 1:11PM
I don't think it will win the format war, I'm starting to doubt there will even be a format war, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray software sales seem to be on a par, which intimates that the same amount of people who bought the 360 add-on are using the PS3 as a Blu-Ray machine. We have several games machines that all use different media, and always have and they live side by side - why not a movie format.
Sony are certainly doing themselves a disservice with this though, It also suggests that a lot of independent movies/media will also end up on HD-DVD.
In terms of this article I would suggest that High Def porn offers exactly the same improvements as other High Def films do over SD films, more so in fact. After all who wouldn't like their porn to look more realistic, like actually being there or to quote some early HD evangelists "like looking through a window", lol.
Bill @ Jan 24th 2007 2:13AM
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/tags/show/Disc_Announcements
Cant get this to copy, but vivid released it's first BD title...
Bill @ Jan 24th 2007 2:15AM
Cool I guess it did. Interesting.
Ben Hobbs @ Jan 25th 2007 1:51AM
Vivid announces its first BD title would be more correct.
Matt @ Nov 27th 2007 10:38PM
At the point in time that this blog started porn siding with one format or the other would not have made that much of a difference because the average person was not buying a player for either format.
However, now that Toshiba has found the average person's price point with players costing $99 and $199 you will see an increase in sales of HD DVD porn as long as they keep the prices in the $25-$40 range.
When you consider that DVD porn sales are currenly in the billions of dollars per year and all other DVD sales combined are in the millions of dollars per year it's easy to see that once people are willing to buy the players, porn could very much have an influence in this format war.
Anyways, my opinion is that now that HD DVD players are flying off the shelves you are very like to see porn HD DVD's flying off the shelves, which in turn could give HD DVD a considerable push.