Sad, but true. The first industry to get hold of and make money from most technologies is the porn industry.
When you have high-income buyers ready to pay big for what they want, you have a business model that can’t be beat. True for porn, true for gambling. While many "early adopters" are geeks who will embrace a technology for its own sake, porn customers are goal-oriented.
So it was porn that pioneered the business model for videotape, porn that pioneered the 900 number, porn that pioneered the DVD and the paid Web site. Attempts to outlaw porn merely act as taxes on this market, just as in every other area.
Now porn is looking at higher capacity DVDs, where there is an ongoing format war between Sony’s Blu-Ray and the HD-DVD standard. Sony says it won’t sell to pornographers. Does this mean HD-DVD will sweep the field?
Loaded onto the bottom of the story above is the real news. It can cost
$25,000 and take two weeks to produce a single Blu-Ray "master." HD-DVD
masters cost much less. Assuming there is demand for either format, I
expect the pornographers will prefer HD-DVD. And so will everyone else.
As usual, when the subject is porn, the truth is found outside the
shot, wearing clothes. There is no demand for Blu-Ray porn, not with
aluminum hard disks grabbing the video market. Now podcast porn (porncasts) and
TiVo porn — that’s another thing.
These forms of porn have a huge advantage over any optical disk. They can be sold directly, online. There is no store,
no loss of mark-up to the producer. Disintermediation, baby! The shop
above has no need to exist if there are no goods for it to stock.
That’s where the market is going. The guess here is that both Blu-Ray
and HD-DVD will die a natural death, and it will be the format which
follows them that will learn its lesson, settle on a single standard,
and offer something truly, uh, new.
