Tactics in the Porn Industry's Fight Against Piracy

An anonymous reader writes "A C|Net article discusses the technological innovations being used by the porn industry to ensure they stay relevant (like streaming HD-quality feeds and remote interaction), as well as profitable. Live performances and cutting-edge technology combine to ensure a steady stream of revenue in the age of free downloads. 'Now Kink.com is on the cutting edge of the fight against video piracy. While mainstream entertainment outlets like Viacom and NBC complain noisily about YouTube, Kink.com, with neither the resources nor the mainstream appeal of its giant counterparts, is in an even tougher fight: Protecting the content it produces that's continually copied and reposted on the dozens of Web sites that traffic in poached adult material.'"

Comments

When you can't do it live use invisible watermarks

[MaelstromX]

Kink.com's solution is live shows.

That's one idea, and a good one. However not all porn can be live, it's simply not feasible for certain types. I would say the best way to prevent piracy and ensure that SOMEBODY finances the production of the stuff would be to slap it with invisible, personally identifying watermarks. If they are spotted on pictures and images found in the wild, so to speak, your subscription is cancelled and you don't get a refund.

Although that might make people want to give them all away the day before their subscription ends, so that part I'm not sure about yet. :)

Re:Summary: they stream live shows

[Ilgaz]

They move to live streams (although at higher resolution than most non-porn streams seem to offer), to make it more difficult and less interesting to copy content.

Honestly, how would that help? Doesn't anyone know about downscaling? A lot of porn video clips still seem to be 320x240 (or at least less than 640x480) in either MPEG-1 or WMV. So all anyone has to do is capture the stream, downscale it to a more reasonable picture size, re-encode it and sell it on their site. You also don't need the massive amounts of bandwidth or storage that these guys need. Realistically, do you really need HD video to watch a woman getting screwed by three hung guys?

Those low res files you talk about are leaked by Porn industry themselves. :) Yes, they are that clever to use a technology (P2P) which was called evil by MPAA to suit their own promotion.

You would be surprised that porn industry are the first ones to use DVD technology in its full feature set like multiple angles.

Massive amounts of bandwidth? Once I had a friend working for a huge network vendor. He said their best customers are porn industry and funny that they could be counted as people "running the internet" after all those dotcom crashes.

Re:Irony

[cliffski]

so all games become online games, all single player games become multiplayer. great.
kiss goodbye to flight sims
kiss goodbye to civilisation as a singleplayer game
kiss goodbye to RPGs.
cool now I can only ever enjoy video games playing against jackasses online. Somehow, I dont think this is a bright future, and we have the people who pirate games to thank for it. Cheers guys.