Porn Industry Trials Burnable DVDs

nukular writes "The LA Times has an article discussing porn giant Vivid following the likes of King Kong in allowing users to download and burn movies to DVD. Unlike in the Hollywood plan, these DVDs will be viewable on other DVD players." From the article: "Despite their obvious differences, adult and mainstream entertainment companies face similar pressures in the Internet age. Both are grappling with how to deliver content securely and reliably to devices in a variety of ways, whether it's prepackaged on DVD for TVs or sent wirelessly to cellphones. Both also want to capitalize on digital delivery methods but can't afford to undercut their retail partners: big-box stores such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for the major studios and mom-and-pop video shops for the porn producers. They also fear online piracy, which the music industry partly blames for its lackluster sales."

Comments

Cinemanow is Vivids Distributor

[microbrewer]

Cinemanow owns and operates All Adult Entertainment the distributor of Vivid's Videos so Hollywood is already onto this and owns the technology to distribute burnable movies .They are using porn as their sacrificial lamb to see if the content ends up on Usenet or P2P networks in the next 3 months .

Cinemanow is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment .

Copy Protection Methods

[BoredWolf]

The way current copy protection works on DVDs is actually quite simple. While the DVD is burning, bad sectors of data are written to the disc. Your computer attempts to read those bad sectors and freaks-out, thus preventing you from watching the DVD on your computer. Conventional DVD players just skip the bad sectors and continue reading from the disc. Burning the data to DVD would work exactly the same as it currently does, except you would actually be writing small bad sectors into the DVD, preventing you from copying that DVD. Therefore, the only protection needed would be some sort of DRM or encryption for the downloaded data so that users can only burn 1 DVD (using some sort of proprietary software, possibly), and can't send the download to others. Of course, you can/i? circumvent all of this by using transcode or analog video streaming... but most people aren't going to go through this trouble for their porn. The porn industry has been successful because they know people will pirate their products, but they aren't necessarily looking to collect the profit that is 'rightfully theirs', they're looking to make a certain amount or percentage of profit per video they film. If you make back even 10 times what you spent to film, what's the point of spending more money to squeeze another 5% profit out of the pirates?