HD-DVD and Blue-Ray DVD are in trouble!

According to the people from the adult video industry, hi-def is too graphic for pornography. All the little blemishes in the actors, such as wrinkles, and extra fat on their bodies are being accentuated on hi-def! So, it's turning people off from pornography. Fairly interesting development for nextgen graphic formats. As the format war is not quite over yet, many people (including me) have concluded that the format war will be decided by the porn industry.

The porn industry has traditionally been the first industry to embrace any new form of distribution technology. The IHT article mentioned that they drove the mass adoption of print media as well as the video cassette. But the article missed out the fact that they are also the ones driving the adoption of high speed broadband all around the world. Most internet technologies developed were driven by the porn, gambling and drug industry. No surprise there. What do you think drove the massive development of video streaming and secure credit card transaction technologies?

Now, if the porn industry decides that hi-def is not good for porn and refuse to release hi-def content, we'd be in some real trouble. I don't think that anyone would bother to buy a HDTV and certainly not a nextgen DVD player. Hi-def isn't going to make any goal scoring look more spectacular. So, that's obviously not the reason why anyone goes out to buy a hi-def set. So, it's important for the porn industry to survive through this teething period and work out all the problems with the media.

Besides replacing their actors, they could probably adopt some technological solutions to their problems. There isn't much that a little bit of image processing magic cannot get rid off. So, cleaning up the images could be a solution. In fact, it might even be possible to do the cleaning up in the actual consumer products. For example, the CELL processor from IBM is capable of decoding and playing up to 15 hi-def streams in real-time. So, it would technically be possible to clean up the images at run-time. Developing such technology might even actually help Sony sell more PS3 units. Imagine the tag-line: "PS3 for better graphic performance!".

All this rambling has reminded me of the AvenueQ song.:

The internet is really really great; For porn.
I've got a fast connection so I don't have to wait; For porn.
There's always some new site; For porn!
I browse all day and night; For porn!
It's like I'm surfing at the speed of light; For porn!