Digital Home Thoughts: Industry Players Look to Porn in Format War

“Just as in the 1980s, when the Betamax and VHS video formats were battling it out for supremacy, the pornography industry will likely play a big role in determining which of the two blue-laser DVD formats--Blu-ray Disc or HD-DVD--will be the winner in the battle to replace current DVDs for high-definition content. Ron Wagner, director of IT operations at E! Entertainment Television, in Los Angeles, said his company has already chosen the Blu-ray Disc format, in large part because of talk in the porn industry favoring it over rival HD-DVD…’If you look at the VHS vs. Beta standards, you see the much higher-quality standard dying because of [the porn industry's support of VHS],’ he said. ‘The mass volume of tapes in the porn market at the time went out on VHS.’”

Well, *ehem*…um…yeah. Here’s the thing. The porn industry, whether anyone likes it or not, is a multi-billion dollar business, and a driving force in the home-video market. It seems logical that other players in the industry would want to follow their lead. It’s a juggernaut and I think it is smart for the studios to acknowledge the weight that they carry in getting people to choose their new format. Dad might not admit it to the family, but he might have an ulterior motive for choosing Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. Now, I was gonna make a joke about who has the bigger discs, but…