Will porn determine the winner in the HD format wars?

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:43 AM on February 28, 2007.

Technology issues are not my beat, and for good reason, but I have casually followed the years-long battle over which High-Definition TV standard will become the next VHS, and which competitors will go the way of the Betamax.

They say that men's desire to kill each other and to look at pictures of naked women is responsible for 99 percent of all technological innovation. It may well be that porn ultimately decides the winner in this case...

AMERICA'S porn kings may decide who wins the biggest format stoush as the battle for the next-generation to replace DVDs heats up.

In January, anyone looking for a winner of the war between the two next-generation discs designed to replace DVD would have picked Blu-ray over the opposing HD-DVD format by a country mile.

The bet looked well-placed: the first two Blu-ray players, Samsung's BD-P1000 and Panasonic's BD10, along with a handful of GB BD movies, were in Australian stores in December.

HD-DVD movies were scarce and a player nowhere in sight.

Software support for Blu-ray is hefty. Every big Hollywood studio except Universal backs Blu-ray, and only a handful of labels are opting to press movies in both formats.

Blu-ray can also count on the hardware support of the world's highest-profile consumer electronics companies including Sony, Panasonic, Apple Computers, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Dell, LG and Hitachi.

The HD-DVD camp includes Toshiba, Microsoft, GE, Kenwood, Canon, Onkyo, Teac, NEC and Mitsubishi.

But the clincher for Blu-ray is Sony's Blu-ray-equipped PS3.

The high-resolution gaming console is due out on March 23 and will be snapped up.

No wonder that last month it looked like a 3-0 to Blu-ray.

But just when it looked like being all over for HD-DVD two things happened.

Both prove why a month is a long time in the ever-shifting and often murky politics of consumer electronics.

The arrival of the HD-E1 -- Toshiba's first HD-DVD player -- in Australia -- in the middle of last month was the first.

The second occurred a week earlier at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, an event at which the adult industry holds a concurrent exhibition.

The whisper coming from LA got louder as the show went on.

Word was the $72 billion-a-year worldwide porn industry would use HD-DVD to maintain its 10 per cent share of an annual market of standard DVDs worth an estimated $30.3 billion.

The official reason was HD-DVD's lower cost of production.

Unofficially, it is Sony's longstanding and praiseworthy policy of disallowing its media to handle pornography.

The upshot is a Lazarus-like revival of HD-DVD.

But the smart money is still on Blu-ray. The format has the software and hardware firepower to see off HD-DVD, notwithstanding the latter's support from the adult industry.

I don't know if one format is better than the other, but I hope Sony loses. I'm not sure why the reporter of this story thinks that a company's attempts to control its products after sale are "praiseworthy," but if I buy a firm's crap, it's mine, and I rather resent the idea that the company has anything to say about it.

Maybe that's just me.

Tagged as: highdef, porn

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.