Forget about James Bond and Blu ray movies driving the HD content market, it’s all about porn and lots of it, according to senior porn executives at last weeks adult entertainment expo which was held in Las Vegas alongside the 2009 CES show. Now the industry is set to deliver porn direct to an iPod or smartphone in an effort to get better “penetration ” of the portable video market.
According to Blu ray industry executives it was the porn industry and their apetite for Full HD content that helped resolve the Blu ray Vs HD DVD battle early last year and it is the porn industry that is selling millions of Full HD movies which are being shot in new Full HD studio’s.
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Many industry analysts believe that the porn industry is way ahead of the HD curve with not only what they are working on now but what they are working on for the future in the production of high definition content.
According to a senior executives from a major porn studio who prefers to not be named the porn industry is set to step up the production of HD porn content and the delivery of that content over IP networks. “We need porn widgets on TV’s that can only be accessed by adults”.
When asked how Australia stacked up they said” Australia is a great market for porn with both the sale of HD discs and from a download prospective. Late last year one ISP approached us to set up a complete porn service for delivery to hotels and homes. A lot of people have notebooks today and can bypass regulated hotel networks to get access to HD porn. This is a fast growing part of our business. In Australia you have a very fast wireless network which for people wanting porn of an evening delivered to a notebook while on the road is a fast way for us to deliver content”.
The porn industry which weas originally a big supporter of HD DVD because of the low cost of manufacturing and a lack of mandatory licensing fees is now moving to Blu ray and the distribution of Blu ray discs however they claim that it is an expensive process and are keen to grown IP HD content for delivery to a HD TV.
At the AVN Expo last January, Blu-ray discs were just starting to show up in adult video booths, while HD DVD’s were present en masse. Many studios had to quickly retool their production plans to keep pace demand.
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The executive who runs a multi million dollar global operation said that the HD disc market has been a hit and miss affair for the adult industry, while some high end online and brick and mortar shops can and do sell Blu-ray discs the majority of sales are still standard definition DVD’s.
“The new Toshiba DVD upscaler is very popular in the porn industry and I think for a while any upscalers that deliver better reproduction of a DVD will be popular”.
The Blu-ray consumer seems to be looking for the best titles, which Joone, president and founder of Digital Playground, one of the largest adult studios in the world, says have raised some major title sales some 50 percent from last year alone on Blu-ray, while smaller studios and lesser titles find sales a small fraction of total market share while HD downloads continue to improve in quality and quantity of sales.
The reasons could be many, while HDTV penetration is high and rapidly growing every year, many homes only have one HDTV in the main viewing area, giving Blu-ray porn limited usability for those with families. It seems the Blu-ray porn consumer is the higher-end of the market, with more disposable income, looking for the best of the genre on this format while everyone has a computer with a display capable of displaying HD content.
So why do I say I think the adult industry is again going to solve the format war for us? Simple, many adult sites have found the Internet to be a hugely successful method of distributing media, and the lack of material costs can improve profit margins as well.
Digital Playground is rolling out an entirely new HD download center where clients can download HD video directly to their iTunes library or for use with their AppleTV.
Pink Visual who had lots of naked women at the AE Expo is already distributing HD downloads for use on your computer and others are following suit. It is only a matter of time until the bandwidth expands and we can all freely download 1080p porn over the Internet said executives.
“There will always be the want for disc ownership, so both conventional and Blu-ray discs will likely be around for a while, especially once the industry begins to take advantage of the BD-Live feature of the newer players, but if history repeats itself, the porn industry will again be the ultimate decider of the final format and in this case, it will be HD downloads leaving major Hollywood studios at the command of the all-powerful dominatrix from the Valley known as the adult industry as they have proven they know how to sell content to consumers in volumes and in formats that mainstream consumers are willing to spend billions on” said a Pink Visual executive.
