No wait. I know, Toshiba earlier this year etc (HDDVD, Wikipedia). But then this guy said the porno business is nonetheless going for HD DVD and the future is uncertain. Is it? Are they?
The battle is over and Sony won. No point in producing HD DVDs when nobody will make any more machines that play them.
What guy is this?
It’s one of “them”. Seriously, it’s just a guy I work with, seemed trustworthy, definitely didn’t bullshit me on purpose - but what do you know.
It’s about time we transferred our porn from those Beta tapes anyways…
Yeah, you know, that’s what I’m thinking – but what format, goddamit? You don’t wanna lose again, man.
Porn was generally on VHS, not Beta. Beta was originally tightly controlled, and they wouldn’t allow production of porn on Beta. Whereas VHS tapes could be made by anybody who could buy or rent a VHS reproducing machine. (At that time, most home machines were players only – record capability was only in the most expensive home machines.)
That is generally considered one of the reasons that VHS won out over Beta – many more videos (especially porn) were available for VHS over Beta.
Don’t be too worried about porn on HD. Though it is happening, it’s not as big a revenue stream or as rapid a pickup as they had expected. Most porn doesn’t actually look so palatable in high definition detail; they’re all low low low budget amateur productions (even the high budget productions are low budget) and HD does not serve them well.
Expect porn to be on regular DVD for the foreseeable future, until On-Demand dominates, which will nto be too far away. HD isn’t really going to make much of an impact.
So predicts the all-seeing eye.
I doubt this, in fact porn is suffering because more and more of it is downloaded through the Internet and a high def version of a porn would consume bandwidth by the mega load. Porn is being hurt by the fact now not only can you download but you can down load a scene so you aren’t even selling the whole movie now.
So porn is too busy worrrying about content and scene downloading to frett about HD
It’s still conceivable for someone to own a video collection in Beta. There was a time window where a savvy consumer could purchase a Beta recorder and a large number of blank cassettes on the cheap at the clearance aisles. Such a person could record a bunch of porn on high quality Beta, which could still be playable today, if stored reasonably well.
Furthermore, it is capable of recording nearly any VHS tape… I won’t go into the details, but some folks took full advantage.
On edit: Also, I know from (ahem, “first-hand”) experience that porn was produced on Beta and available to average consumers.
Here’s an article talking about this when it first came up in January 2007:
I presume that’s what the guy was referring to. Since then, HD-DVD has died, so I wouldn’t say it’s very relevant.