By: María José
Escobar Pla
The adult film
industry in the format wars (Beta vs. VHS or BluRay vs. HD-DVD) can be describe
mostly according to time. According to my research I can say different thing
about this audiovisual “war”.
The Federal Criminal
Code said, “in Los Angeles alone, the porno business does $100 million a year in
gross retain volume", in their Revision of 1979. Over the past 30 years the American adult
entertainment industry has grown a lot and this is continually changing and
expanding to appeal to new markets (according to the Attorney General´s
Commission on Pornograpgy).
There was another home-video war that pitted Sony against another
Japanese company, JVC, long before the battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD,
talking about general production, not only the adult ones and actually that war
was between VHS vs. Betamax. After long time VHS won the battle (not yet the
entire war) and they said that the porn industry played a big role for that
victory to happened, because “Sony
reportedly wouldn’t let pornographic content be put on Betamax tapes, while JVC
and the VHS consortium had no such qualms”.
The accessibility of having porn on
VHS killed Betamax. Betamax and VHS (in the 70s) fight a lot over which home
viewing technology would be the leader and the successful one. One of their
biggest differences was that the format of Sony´s Betamax (made for better
recording quality) each tape had only 60 minutes (one hour) of footage;
compering this to the 180 minutes (three hours) of footage that had VHS. But
the meaning of this is actually that people couldn’t tape their favorite movies
or experience the entire three hours of adult content movies.
“By the end
of the 1970s, erotic films accounted for over half of all videotape sales in
the United States, regardless of the fact they cost $800 back then”.
Around 1986 the adult content industry should owned in between $100
million and $ 1 billion, which is only a part of the $4,47 billion claimed
above in 1986; this is because the adult content industry pegged in at $750
million to $1 billion in annual revenue, according to Forrester online report
on the online “adult content” in 1998.
Just
as in the 1980s, when the Betamax and VHS video formats were battling out for
the pornography industry leadership, now the battle is for the two blue- laser
DVD formats: HD DVD and BluRay. Who will be the winner in the battle to replace
DVDs for high-definition content? Ron Wagner, director of IT operations at E!
Entertainment Television Inc., in Los Angeles, said “his company has already chosen the Blu-ray Disc format, in large part
because in the porn industry favoring it over rival HD-DVD”.
And
he also said that Wagner said that “more
than one panel discussed several major players in the porn industry going the
Blu-ray route”, while attending the National Association of Broadcasters
(NAB) annual conference in Las Vegas.
When Sony blew it on Betamax, they made up with the release of Blu-Ray. HD
DVD's quality was higher, while Blu-Ray simply held more information, similar
to the difference between Betamax and VHS back then, (which meant more
behind-the-scenes, more deleted scenes, more actor commentary and more “naked
actions”). Blu-Ray's victory was ultimately decided when the porn industry
started using Blu-Ray as high-definition. Just like Betamax, porn killed HD DVD.
On the other hand, because of the lower production
costs (being this the main reason) and better technology, the adult content
industries prefer HD DVD. At the beginning, neither HD DVD or BluRay were
willing to help the pornography industries with their mass-producing on their
films, but obviously for us now, the HD DVD did help them.
According to Wicked Pictures, “they had no success in getting any company to mass-produce its films on
Blu-ray, but still hopes to work with the Blu-ray format eventually”.
HD-DVD has a capacity of storage of 30GB, in contrast
of BluRay that offers a storage up to 50 GB of capacity or up to nine hours of
HD content; and one interesting fact is that BluRay is not only backed by
entertainment giant Sony, but Panasonic, LG Electronics, Philips Electronics and
movie studios Disney and Fox, meanwhile HD-DVD is supported by companies like
Toshiba, NEC and Warner Home Video.
Few years ago and nowadays, with all the Internet
creation and revolution porn totally runs the Internet, and its actually
killing all the other formats. In 2001, there were about 70,000 adult
websites. Today, there are more than 4.2 million pornographic websites in the
U.S. only. At any second of the day, there are at least 30,000,000 unique
visitors viewing porn.
Sources used:
http://www.macworld.com/article/1050627/storage/pornhd.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/01/22/porn-industry-may-decide-dvd-format-war.html:
Copyright © 2006 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of
Ziff Davis Media Inc. is prohibited.
https://www.thrillist.com/vice/how-porn-influenced-technology-8-ways-porn-influenced-tech-supercompressor-com
http://www.myce.com/news/Adult-film-industry-gets-no-help-from-Blu-ray-so-far-12862/
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