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Porn Industry Mulls Next Generation-DVD
MBCook writes "ZDNet has an interesting article about how the porn industry might end up deciding the outcome of the HD-DVD/Blu-ray debate. One side likes the higher capacity of Blu-ray, while others like the lower costs of producing HD-DVDs. Manufacturing 11,000 titles a year, the industry would have a sizeable say in the debate."
Blew Ray?
The bigger the better!
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
I just thought it was all in the internet?
I would rather be ashes than dust!
In the end, porn really is what drives technology forward. You can believe that when we have fully tactile 3d VR, we'll have it because the porn industry invented it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Why did VHS win and Betamax fail? Some people (including me) argue that the biggest reason is that all th eporn was available on VHS. Wasn't there a statement against porn from the betamax people?
Which industry was the only industry for a long time acually delivering profits selling stuff on the web during a time when all other industries promised a lot but only delivered losses?
And remember the multiple-angle button on the DVD players? Who really thinks that this button was designed for the sports industry?
I think the article hits the nail right on the head. The porn industry will decide which format will be used.
Funny thing is, I've never finished watching one either. /seen the first 6 minutes several times tho...
People find it strange that I don't know how to juggle or tap dance.
"10-foot pole" in a discussion on porn isn't a term I'm going to touch with a...
One only has to look to the Betamax to find a superior home entertainment technology that lost partially because the porn industry embraced the competitor. (actually, IIRC, Sony refused to license the beta to porn).
Turning it off after the first 4 minutes isn't a failure of the porn, it's lack of stamina.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
They have been heavily involved in the development and early adopters of: online credit card transactions, streaming video/webcams, VHS, multi-angle DVDs, pop-up ads, affiliate programs, pay-per-view, 900 #s, geo-targetting... the list goes on.
SSL Certificate
11000 porn titles a year? Goodness, who's actually watching all that? I rented a few porn movies myself when I was young
Back in the day when we were boys we had one (1) playboy for the whole neighborhood.
And we were grateful.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
First, if the industry puts more and more porn onto one disc they'll risk losing sales if they charge more for that one disc. If someone is ordering porn on sees a $50 disc and a $25 dollar disc, I'm guessing they'll go with the $25 disc, regardless of how much porn is on the former.
Second, the vast majority of porn actresses are NOT that good looking. Sure they look somewhat OK on DVD, but once you put them on HD you'll start noticing the grotesque flaws, e.g., surgical scares.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Too true. A game released as adult-only: Tons of gore, rivers of blood, some glimpses of naked tits. Same game released as PG-13: Tons of gore, rivers of blood, pixelated tits.
...and now we have Mafia bosses deciding what standard we will use.
But it's not only production...
Remember "Morrowind?" There was a character named Crassius Curio, a lord with taste for earthly deligts. He wasn't a very demanding master. His tasks were quite simple. "Take off all your clothes and show yourself to uncle Crassius." Menawhile other "lords" demanded assassination of competitors, mugging people, blackmail, requested bribes, wanted betrayal and all kind of such filth. Now visit Morrowind forums and look up for threads "most hated NPC". Of course harmless Crassius is far in front of the list and many people boast how they sneakily murdered him or what tortures would they want to apply to him.
It's scary how activity of destroying life is more accepted that creating it, and how strong hipocrisy makes otherwise harmless (unless of course taken over by the crime organizations, i.e. because of the reputation) porn industry "the devil".
Probably if it wasn't treated as such "sneaky back door" stuff, all the wrongs (rape, slavery, violence) could be fought better too.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The stereotypical macho guy is bothered by looking at another guy.
Especially the five different prison escapees who show up in every straight mainstream porno. They are hairy and flabby and covered with tatoos.
Why? Because straight guys are comfortable with that.
Don't ask me why straight guys are OK with that one camera angle where the camera is pointed straight up between the guy's legs while he's going at it with a bored, plastic blonde, so that all you see is fat, hairy man ass. Is there a straight guy somewhere who wants to see that?
I have observed that the guys in gay movies (or at least the box covers) or European films tend to be a lot better looking (fit, less hairy etc). Still look like prison escapees, but maybe not the maximum security wing.
Anyway, the straight guy watches a couple girls and can have the fantasy that "Gee, all they REALLY need is a man."
Which is the kind of thing that will make an actual lesbian laugh out loud.
And for the record, I don't think anyone watches all 11,000 titles, but someone with a real interest in any particular subject matter can probably see all of the couple dozen titles related to that fetish that are released in a given year. I do pretty well with mainstream feature releases from Vivid, Wicked, VCA, Adam & Eve et al.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
If you check one of the links in the Betamax Wikipedia article you linked to, you'd notice this article debunking the Betamax player superiority as a myth.
The article has several good points, although it's sometimes hard to tell what can be attributed to hindsight and what can't. Anyhow I think it's safe to say that "Betamax > VHS" is a huge oversimplification.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
National Geographic? You were lucky having pictures. We had Reader's Digest.
You had paper??
We lied down on the grass, looking up at the clouds and imagining they were in sexual positions...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Seeing as how I used to sell this stuff in mass quantities to some of the lowliest scum on the face of the planet, all I can say is this...
There is no reason for them embrace this new technology until it becomes mainstream and cheap. So few movies make use of the multiple camera angles , and those that do cost $59.99 (retail mind you.) They're the Jenna Jameson or (insert some triple implanted face lifted ugly skank here) movie where she's not even doing another guy, it's all solo vibrator stuff.
If they need to put more content on there, they just put it on another DVD fairly cheaply, then hike the price up a lot. The Fashionistas was some glamourous production, coming on 4 discs. Yes, 4 discs. Just like LotR, 2 discs were movie, 1 was extra crap you'd never watch, and 1 was more extra crap you'd never watch. $79.99 retail. It's about the only movie I've seen use multiple disks for actual content that wasn't just cuts of other movies.
Most movies that are over 60-90 minutes are just a bunch of cuts from other movies, some huge 8 hour montage.
Not to mention bondage, those movies are a total of 30 minutes. That's it.
$29.99 - $39.99 is the selling point price it seems for most profit. Hell, we'd sell movies we bought for $1.50 for $39.99 and people would buy them. Want to make some money? Open an adult bookstore. They raked in about $20K net profit... net... per month.
I highly doubt they'll use the extra capacity to make a longer movie, or even put in extra angles, or much of anything else. They will move to the next gen format only when other people are using it enough to make profitable to them.
Why?
They are already making a lot of money without using next gen discs, without putting in extra content, and without putting in extra angles. All this is fluff that people do not care about, they just want to buy some movie that has a picture of a goat on the front.
Yes, true story... some man wanted to rent a movie that said "Explicit material" on the front and had a picture of a goat. He asked me at least 10 times if they had sex with the goat in it, and each time I assured him it was illegal and there would be no animal sex of any kind in it. After all this, he rents it anyways just to make sure.
f-ing sick. I'll spare you some of the more graphic stories, but let me tell you... nothing makes you more apathetic for humanity that working in a pr0n store for almost three years.
I think the porn industry will have little or no influence on this fight. Unlike with Betamax/VHS, the porn producers already have a cheap, ubiquitous format, and there's no way that porn is stretching the limits of DVD.
I think computer users will influence the decision. Given a penny or two's difference in medium cost, a computer user will most likely opt for the bigger storage medium. I doubt many will have any qualms about a $50 difference between a Blu-Ray-ROM and a HD/DVD-ROM, considering the huge size difference. A number of game companies are already endorsing Blu-Ray, because they have no problem packing in extra content (the game itself and associated media, possibly in many resolutions, artwork, story boards, sound files, desktop themes etc. etc.).
The entertainment industry is leaning towards HD/DVD for the moment, but I think that the sheer volume of Blu-Ray discs that computer users would consume (movie consumers don't buy stacks of 100 discs at a time) would force the price down to compete or beat HD/DVD. The entertainment insudtry would probably have to follow the crowd, assuming they don't jump on the bandwagon early. The porn industry would probably follow later.
Many people are aware that the porn industry has been a major driving force in the adoption of new entertainment technologies. However, the next-gen DVD isn't exactly a new technology per se, it's just an upgrade to an existing technology. It offers pretty much nothing new to porn producers except more space, which they don't need. DVD's already have scene-selection, menus, multiple angles, soundtracks, etc. What really does the next-gen format have to offer?
It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.
From what I understood, Blu-Ray continues to use MPEG-2 while HD-DVD uses MPEG-4, so HD-DVD didn't need as much space as Blu-Ray does. But looking at specs online, I see that MPEG-4 is listed as one of many codecs supported for both. It's confusing following the process of both formats.
So am I right in saying the only technical difference between each disc is that Blu-Ray holds more data and has twice the data transfer rate? Googling for actual differences between the two, beyond vague descriptions of "differing manufacturing processes," is difficult. Based on the assumptions above, Blu-Ray appears to be the superior format. I just want the absolute most superior movie format for posterity's sake.
When you get right down to it, which format is the best?
To be a little more precise, in the US capitalism is the economic vehicle that the porn industry and the military industrial complex are driving to reach higher technology. Capitalism is a nice theory, but it requires money to actually make it work. That money comes from Ron Jeremy and Donald Rumsfeld. (Never thought you'd see those two in a sentence next to each other, did you?)
Without assigning any moral judgment to porn (or the military, for that matter), I simply state that those two industries contribute the largest amount of money to new technology development.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.