Adult Entertainment Antes Up In DRM War

At the recent adult entertainment awards, host Greg Fitzsimmons highlighted the deep relationship between the internet and pornography stating "'The Internet was completely funded by porn,' he said [...] And if it wasn't for the Internet, he added, 'you guys would be completely out of business.' The audience, packed with porn actors and adult entertainment moguls like Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt, roared with laughter." Now it appears that the adult entertainment industry has chosen to ante up in the DRM battle as well. Some companies have chosen to take sides, like Digital Playground who will be supporting Sony's Blu-Ray. Others, like Vivid Entertainment, seem to think that the answer is diversity and will be supporting both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Comments

Just Like VHS or Beta

[eldavojohn]

Once a friend of mine commented that VHS was superior in quality to Betamax but that the only reason VHS won was because Sony refused to license porn on their format. Whether this is true or not is probably debatable. But now we see the industry vying for licenses to the porn industry for their new formats. Why? Perhaps Sony learned their lesson with Betamax ...

Ironically, I'm going to wager that Spongebob and Pikachu have more clout than Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt in the format war. Because every child needs a babysitter and that babysitter always comes in the newest format.

Power of porn?

[timster]

This theory -- that porn was the "true" #1 force behind the VCR and the Internet -- has been repeated so many times that it's taken almost as a truism. But how true is it really? My personal experience suggests that people purchased Internet access for information and communication purposes, and that for the most part it was sites like Amazon that brought us e-commerce. Does anybody know of any research or science that backs up or refutes this claim?

Re:Power of porn?

[DynamoJoe]

My first job out of college in 1996 was as a help desk rep for a south florida ISP. Because our sales staff were mainly retirees, we had a disproportionately huge number of geriatric users (try walking them through Dial Up Scripting).

Anyway, I remember taking many calls (sometimes several calls per night) from old fogies who 'just bought the internet and wanted to get to the dirty pictures'. Of course, YMMV, but I think porn did fund a lot of the internet's growth well before amazon.com started luring users...

Re:Power of porn?

[Tackhead]

> My personal experience suggests that people purchased Internet access for information and communication purposes, and that for the most part it was sites like Amazon that brought us e-commerce. Does anybody know of any research or science that backs up or refutes this claim?

It goes back farther than that.

Instead of thinking "Amazon" and "e-commerce", think USENET and alt.sex.

Once upon a time, alt.sex was the main reason (well, if you were a college student) to do this USENET thing. Then some schmuck figured out that you could uuencode a binary file into 7-bit-clean text, and upload it into alt.sex, and every other schmuck on the planet could see teh b00bies.

When a scanner cost thousands of dollars, you could get your b00bies in one of three ways: Buy the dead trees (and deal with storing them :), download the pictures from a pay BBS at 2400 baud (because someone else paid thousands of dollars for a scanner), or copy them from the news spool free (and not have to wait, because the college's 56k leased line was up 24/7!) from USENET, because some other guy who already bought the dead trees was willing to use the scanner in the lab (that had already been paid for :) to scan in the pictures and upload them (again for free, because the leased line was always there) to alt.sex.

Needless to say, this didn't last long - kilobytes turned into megabytes, hard drives overflowed, links became saturated, and thus was born alt.sex.pictures. And because news admins got tired of dealing with alt.sex.yet.another.funny.group name (which had to be permitted) and denying alt.sex.pictures.* (whose groups would overflow the news spool in rapid order), there was a great split - and thus was born alt.binaries.*.

Long story short -- USENET administrators needed more diskspace and bandwidth, and at one time, pr0n was indeed a major proportion of all USENET traffic, and even though the transmission network was still in the process of shifting from UUCP store-and-forward technology to a TCP/IP network, the fundamental issues of bandwidth and storage remained.

That's not to say there weren't other legitimate uses for all that bandwidth and storage; there were. But the growth of USENET (on account of a lot of sites -- even corporate sites, which would be unthinkable today -- maintaining "a full feed", including alt.binaries.*, out of either a sense of tradition or a pervy newsadmin) was in large part fueled by pr0n. And in large part, the growth of USENET drove "the Internet".

USENET was the first peer-to-peer network. Each "peer" was a machine costing tens of thousands of dollars in hardware, and hundreds of dollars a month, but considering that "consumer-level" communications was limited to 2400-baud modems, the combination of a USENET server to store "everything", and deliver it through the university LAN, was a huge step forward for the end user.

Typical conversation from circa 1988:

Fourth-year-student: "USENET? It's like a BBS, with ten thousand message boards, a hundred thousand users, and no waiting to connect to it! And FTP? It's like a download section of a BBS, with no upload quota! And you can get files from anywhere in the world! Look, here's an FTP server with a collection of all those DOS utilities you'll ever need, and it's in Finland, fer Chrissakes, and it doesn't cost a cent to call it up!"

First-year student: "Finland? Why Finland?"

Fourth-year student: "Why not? But if you don't like Finland, we'll get it from the mirror at White Sands Missile Range!"

First-year student: "Whoa!"

Huh, that's surprising. What about p2p and porn?

[Vokkyt]

I would think that on a whole, the pornography industry would see The Internet as a love/hate relationship. Granted, it allows production and sales to a degree that wasn't fathomable for porn before, however, the mass filesharing means that one well off user can make off with tons of files from the site and host it else where. I mean, I guess it's good to know know that the love that the Internet has for porn is mutual, but wow, that's an awfully warm reception.

The porn industry won't be such a big driver

[99luftballon]

Back in the early 80's there was very little access to pornography, particularly film.

Nowadays the situation is must less restricted and anyone with an internet connection can watch the filth of their choice with little difficulty and with no need of a media player. The internet distribution system is also a lot harder to censor.

One of the interesting things about the Blu-Ray announcement was that a key driver for the porn company was that PlayStation 3's will have drives built in. Is this an oblique way for calling PS3 players wankers?

Re:The porn industry won't be such a big driver

[OS24Ever]

Yes but in the late 70s and early 80s the performers were being hunted down and arrested for prostitution here in the US. I can't find a link that describes it but in Ron Jeremey's Biography they talked about the challenges to making porn there is a little bit mentioned here in his wiki entry.

I believe it was California v. Freeman that killed this method of persecution, opening the door up for what we have to enjoy or hate today.

MS DRM

[TubeSteak]

I don't think anyone has broken Microsoft's WMV DRM.

You know, the one that requires you to connect to some server and get a license.

Anyways, I don't think 30GB dvd rips are exactly going to 'take off' on P2P networks. Even the DVD-R trading scene isn't that big.

Not VHS/Beta again, and Porn not deciding factor.

[amcdiarmid]

This is not VHS vs BETA all over again, and porn is not the deciding factor.

1. The Key Difference between Blu-Ray/HDVD & VHS/Beta: Home Video Exists.
2. Porn is not the deciding factor, because content exists. In the Home Video industry infancy, none did - except for porn.
3. Blue-Ray will probably win due to computing convergence. (assuming relatively equal prices on a recording capacity basis)

          When the Home Video Player war came out, there was no home video standard - and no home video content. Pornography drove the industry because there was no existing content, and people would (will) pay for porn videos. Since the movie industry was reluctant to make any move - the only content was porn. Perhaps VHS won because it was cheaper (lower cost for content providers), or becuase Sony really refused to license Betamax to Porn. In any case, at that time Porn was the content provider for the early home video industry. (Side note, I remember seeing Record size Video Disks of non-porn-Movies before ever seeing tapes. (I also remember that piracy was going to distroy the motion picutre industry.)

          Today, the home video industry is a large (booming) industry. Tapes have been supplanted by Digital Disks for content providers, and for recording. I suspect that the key difference in who wins the Blue-Ray/DVD battle is going to be price. People were willing to pay $$$$ for video decks when none existed, but are unlikely to pay $$$$ for video that is only of improved quality. (See the takeup rates for HDTV)

          The short version is that whomever can reach critical mass production & lower costs first wins. The key difference may be storage capacity for computers. Why, you ask, will computers be a key factor for a Home Video technology? Because the replacement of Computer Backup Tape drives may provide enough of a market to gain true Mass Production capacity first.

          One of the claims why Sony lost the Beta/VHS battle was that it took two tapes for many movies. That is, it cost 2x to produce a Beta Tape set relative to a VHS set. This is not going to be a problem, as both camps are stating that they will have the capacity to put movies in HD with extras on their disks. Since Sony, et. al., are claiming that they will have much higher capacity for Blu-Ray, they will probably be used for computer backups in business systems. (You know, the Autoloaders that currently cost $15,000 & $100/tape) This will help Sony get the cost down faster. In the end, price matters & we are only talking about imporoved video. No one really cares if Sponge-Bob is in High Defination or not anyhow.

Re:It's backwards

[drinkypoo]

I think you have it the wrong way round, porn was completely funded by the Internet and if it wasn't for the Internet's distribution system you guys wouldn't have a medium to generate that $2.5 billion revenue

Porn is a huge percentage of the traffic on the 'net. That 'net is paid for by people who pay for a 'net connection and possibly pay even more per byte transferred. Thus, porn is paying for the net. It's not that they have it backwards, it's that they're only talking about half of the relationship, and as they state it, it's entirely true. Granted, if porn didn't get there first, someone else would have, but one of the truisms of modern media is that porn always gets there first.

Re:It's in the format specs.

[Travoltus]

Right, it's in both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD format specs. But I still don't see where the porn industry anted up in the DRM war any more than they did when they moved from VHS to DVD. Many porn DVDs come out that aren't region encoded (in fact, hardly any are), and a majority of them (*ahem* *hmmmm*) aren't even CSS encrypted. You can copy them right to the hard disk and to another DVD (*sirens*). There's nothing in this article that says porn producers are looking for any kind of DRM - it's just there no matter what they choo-(*door breaking down*)

OMFG ITS THE FEDZ@!#!##!$!!!!

I thought most porn is region free

[DrXym]

So where does the DRM come into it? Whichever format they choose most porn studios are going to throw the switches to reach as large an audience as possible.

Phoning Home

[PhotoBoy]

If this DRM is like a lot of the other stuff I've seen it will phone home to check if you're allowed to watch the film. I for one don't particularly want my porn phoning home to tell someone you're about to watch Lesbo Rim Jobs From Mars. Isn't there some invasion of privacy law that can be thrown at this?

Re:hmm.

[freeweed]

If it's loved so much (and it is), why is the industry constantly under attack?

There's a town in a rural area near the city I grew up in, that's extremely religious, to the point where it's like the town in Footloose: dancing is banned. Also, selling alcohol within town limits is against the law there. There are no other communities within at least 50 miles of any sizable population.

Someone set up a liquor store literally on the other side of the town line. It's one of the most profitable in the country. You do the math.

Morality attacks against booze and "adult" entertainment generally come from two groups: one, the (very) vocal minority. Two, the hypocritical majority.