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Porn Industry Ready To Drop Flash
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting new angle to the ongoing Flash-HTML5 debate. Digital Playground, one of the major adult film studios, said it would drop Flash today if all browsers were HTML5-ready (*cough*, IE8, *cough*). The company's founder said, 'Flash brings everything to a crawl and has an impact on battery life. With HTML5, there is no reason to show our content in Flash.' Digital Playground also indicated that it does not expect 3-D to gain mass acceptance any time soon."
Why would 3D gain faster acceptance? Who wouldn't want tits to basically jump out of your screen and nearly hit you in the face?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Think you have it the other way around ... porn has driven tech industry and consumer electronics for a very long time. No other vendor has the power that PORN does , if porn industry unilaterally decided tomorrow to adopt HTML5 .. in very short time, every computer on the planet would have upgraded their browser. period.
Yeah, everyone seems to be ready to drop flash for video playback, but what codec will their videos be encoded with?
As it stands today:
- Use h264 and all firefox users will be left off
- use theora and almost everyone will be left off
- use VP8 and most browsers won't support it
- use X and Y browser will not support it.
use flash and... 99% browsers will support it. Having said that, I hate flash, but I guess the world is not ready for HTML5 just yet, mainly because of the codecs issue.
Lets hope VP8 is a success! :-)
Wikipedia says this company is pretty influential in the porn industry, though not the only player. I suppose it's sort-of interesting to hear what he thinks. Though there's no real meat to the article, it's almost like an anti-Flash astro-turf.
I think all content producers are generally looking forward to moving to HTML5 video. That doesn't mean that Flash is dead. It could potentially mean that in 3-5 years Flash will not be used for video. Right now, Flash is pretty much the only option. In a year or two, HTML5 video will be a reasonable competitor. After that, well I guess it's up to Adobe to figure out ways of making their product more appealing than the baseline (which is HTML5). But they have a dominant position now, support of major players, and seem committed to improving their product. It's hard to discount them on the word of one porn producer.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Seriously, this is just nonsese.
1. Digital Playground are nobodies in the online porn market. Yes, they produce a lot of content, but it's all for the DVD market.
2. One studio saying something isn't representative of an entire industry. It's actually called a 'Press Release'
3. The vast majority of adult sites allow you to pick your poison in terms of video. Streaming is normally done via flash [.x/h264 mp4 being the norm], and allowing downloads in AVI/DivX/WMV/MPEG formats.
4. What porn does provide is a solid statistics cross-section of internet users - and from the figures I see, flash usage is 96% or higher. The vast majority of purchasing users aren't high tech, they don't use noscript, they don't think flash is evil.
5. Porn (and any commercial) sites aim to make their sites as available to as many people as possible. Forcing users to upgrade browsers, attempting to change browsing habits, etc, is only going to lower the bottom line.
People have somehow become confused about this over the past three decades. The correct and verifiable historical claim is that porn drove rapid initial adoption of video recorders in general. Porn has been a major factor in the introduction and acceptance of a number of technologies.
Can I get a job there? I'm sure I'd enjoy the work.
But seriously, I wish people would stop overestimating porn's influence. Its annual revenue is less than 1% of total internet revenue. Its perceived impact on the world (or technology) is no more real than a 12 inch long penis, or the "18 year old" models that are actually 27.
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I don't care if I sound like a troll: Fuck Avatar.