You may end up with that season five Lost set, the one where we finally find out what the big idea was, on HD-DVD because of what the adult industry is deciding today. Steve Safran has an interesting post up over at Lost Remote talking about how the porn industry may swing the format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Steven Hirsch from Vivid Entertainment is quoted talking about the troubles they have had in trying to adopt Blu-Ray, saying "It was difficult, and (Sony) tried to block us." This is not unlike the VHS/Betamax battle where the adult industry's choice helped promote the adoption of the VHS technology. While it operates completely off the radar of many consumers, the adult industry has a lot of power where technology is concerned.
Steve asks at the end oh his post, "Could the same mistakes really happen again?" Absolutely. I have every confidence that Sony can make the same mistakes all over again and cost themselves the format war, despite having arguably better technology. The company has a history of bucking standards and trying to force their own technology on people. Look at UMD, Memory Stick, and Mini-Disc as examples. Perhaps if they hadn't waited until 2005! to get native support for MP3 they might have actually given Apple a run for their money in the portable digital music player race.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-14-2007 @ 6:59PM
Armen said...
Ugh, come on guys, it's affect if you would like to use it as a verb.
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1-14-2007 @ 5:14PM
Dave said...
Affect, not effect
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1-14-2007 @ 6:28PM
Brett said...
Right you are Dave. I fixed it.
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1-14-2007 @ 8:53PM
Jaymez said...
Funny thing about porn. It's a multi-million dollar industry yet only a handfull of people are willing to admit they watch the stuff.
Anything that'll cause the industry to swing one way or the other will be good. I won't make the jump to the next new technology until the format war had been won. I won't buy anything on DVD, personally. I don't like watching the same thing over and over. One repeat is enough for me.
I gotta admit, though, I don't want to see porn in high def at all. Between more visable surgery scars, bad make-up, and poor lighting, I'm not sure I want to see porn in a clearer format.
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1-14-2007 @ 10:51PM
nick said...
The only thing I find interesting here is that Sony is cited as the reason for not allowing these distributors to have their films/video on Blu-Ray. Yet when the discussion of Blu-Ray comes up in general, everyone says it's NOT Sony's format and that Blu-Ray is a consortium.
Apparently it is Sony's format.
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