The hi-def disc wars are over, and Blu-Ray lost
HD-DVD won. It is as official as it can get. THE technological indicator of the last 30 years has spoken, and it has NEVER been wrong; the porn industry is LEAVING Blu-Ray and ALL going to HD-DVD. And it is all Sony's responsibility. Own Sony stock? I'd sell. Here's the story.Sony isn't fond of porn. When Sony released the PSP, with its movie playback capability, Sony vowed that porn would not be given a license to use the UMD format, thus making it effectively impossible for porn producers to sell movies for the PSP. You might think that a tad odd in this seemingly liberal age, but as a gigantic multinational corporation Sony has to walk that tightrope between giving the customer anything they want and getting a political black eye. Sony is the sole licensing body for their proprietary formats, formats that they either created or patented or both to insure that no one else could legally use those technologies without paying Sony extra money. The PSP's disc format, UMD, is tightly controlled by Sony and in theory there are no commercial UMDs out there that are not Sony-approved. Thus the dilemma... how do you tell conservative middle America that you are family friendly while approving the release of "Bukkake Bimbos #47"?
Most companies find a balance, usually in the form of total silence and denial on the subject of porn. This works, as silence is not an admission of guilt, and while you are welcome to yell at an ostrich "HEY! You, with your head in the sand! I KNOW you can hear me!! Pull your head out of there, I have a harsh question to ask you and no matter what your answer you probably can't win, so C'MERE!! HEY!! HEY!! I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME IN THERE!!!" the ostrich is free to ignore you and you will grow tired and leave (those watching you and the ostrich would have left long ago out of boredom). Sony however has historically always stood pretty firm on the subject of porn... we want none of that here! Sony's proud tradition of eschewing porn is decades old... and cost them one of the most important products of all time, a product they had the lead in and a product that was technically superior, but doomed by one fatal decision.
A far more important battle against porn was waged by Sony back in the early 80's when then introduced the Betamax video cassette recorders; Sony refused to license the Beta format to the burgeoning video porn industry, so despite the fact that Beta was a technically superior format over VHS the porn industry was forced to embrace the only platform that was not deliberately trying to stop them, VHS. Within a couple of years VHS had the overwhelming strength of numbers necessary to crown it king of the formats and bury Beta once and for all. It didn't come as much of a surprise when Sony announced they didn't want porn on Blu-Ray, and I suspect that most in the porn industry assumed this was just public posturing that wouldn't really amount to anything. After all, this is NOT 1982 and porn is now considerably more mainstream that it used to be. If you believe that the Sony Playstation 3 is going to be a significant force in the home living room than it makes sense to want to throw in with the Blu-Ray folks, even though the studies from both the Blu-Ray and the HD-DVD folks show that it is less costly to make HD-DVD. Initially there was a strong showing of support from the porn industry embracing Blu-Ray, with many companies announcing that they would be introducing titles on Blu-Ray, and a few even made it to market although Sony claims that they have never granted a Blu-Ray license to any porn producer so these may have come from disc duplication houses that had a valid Sony license to work with Blu-Ray but did not actually have authorization and approval from Sony to make discs for the porn industry. Sony has stated it will crack down on these supposedly illegal Blu-Ray titles, which means there may not be any more porn titles coming out on Blu-Ray... ever again.
So, when I saw that EVERY SINGLE porn studio that was exhibiting at the 2007 AVN convention had announced that they were ALL backing HD-DVD I breathed a sigh of relief. The high-definition format wars just ended, and the Toshiba group's HD-DVD won. Congratulations, guys.
And to the porn industry, thanks for settling the format wars. The world owes you a debt (again) that most people will never understand (again). Please embrace Windows as an operating system and the Xbox 360 as a game platform so that we can do away with Macs and the PS3 as soon as possible. ;)
(C) 2007 Don Stratton
No comments: