Posted on 05/15/2006 6:51:18 AM PDT by Abathar
LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood has been tiptoeing its way toward letting consumers buy a movie online, burn it onto a DVD and watch it on a living-room TV.
While the studios hesitate, the adult film industry is taking the leap.
Starting Monday, Vivid Entertainment says it will sell its adult films through the online movie service CinemaNow, allowing buyers to burn DVDs that will play on any screen, not just a computer.
It's another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat.
"Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff," said Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, a consumer electronics think tank in Plano, Texas.
"The rest of Hollywood stands back and watches and lets the pornography industry work out all the bugs," he said.
There are business and technology factors that make it easier for adult film companies to embrace new technology faster than traditional media.
On the business side, Hollywood makes more money offering films on DVDs than in theaters. As a result, studios are hesitant to anger large retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Blockbuster by selling DVD-ready downloads directly to consumers.
Recently, most of the big studios have started selling films over the Web, including on CinemaNow, which is partly owned by the film studio Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Blockbuster Inc. Consumers can burn a backup DVD, but it can only be played by a computer, not a DVD player.
The adult film industry doesn't face the same business challenges.
"We don't have to divvy up the pie," said Bill Asher, co-chairman and co-owner of Vivid Entertainment, the largest distributor of adult entertainment. "We sell in smaller stores, mainstream chains, but no one dominant component where we're going to get that phone call."
There are also technical issues for Hollywood to resolve.
To prevent piracy, studios now use what's known as the "content scrambling system," or CSS, to keep consumers from copying DVDs and sending the files around the Internet.
The system, which is easily circumvented, is built into every DVD player to block the playing of movies on discs burned by a computer.
That obstacle has been overcome in the design of high-definition DVDs, which are just now becoming available.
Both rival high-def brands, HD DVD and Blu-ray, use new protection schemes that allow DVDs burned in a computer to play on a DVD player. But it will be years before new players that accommodate those discs replace older models.
The studios say they are preparing to allow the online burning of DVDs for playing on TVs once the new high-definition players become widely adopted.
Vivid says its downloads, which will cost $19.95, do not use CSS. Instead, online retailer CinemaNow is using an alternate, proprietary system that it says will protect the adult movies by preventing the burned DVD from being copied to other discs.
"They built a better mousetrap," Asher said of CinemaNow.
Despite the challenges, mainstream studios are taking some risks and inching toward downloadable DVDs.
Both Warner Bros. and Universal Studios have launched hybrid programs overseas in which consumers who download films also get a DVD in the mail.
But the real goal, analysts say, is to pipe major Hollywood movies and TV shows over the Internet directly to TV sets, bypassing DVDs altogether.
"How about I just turn my set on and press 'go,"' Greeson said. "That's the holy grail."
Hollywood is moving slowly in that direction but must first devise ways to placate retailers, broadcast affiliate partners, movie theaters and others with bottom lines threatened by the move.
"The more they champion Internet distribution directly to the consumer, the more it seems they're turning their back on their old media partners, which they can't afford to do," Greeson said.
So yet again, unencumbered by such business roadblocks, the adult film industry could lead the way.
"The vanguard here is porn," Greeson said. "They made a tremendous amount of money on the Web, but they know they can make more if they get to the living room."
"Just doing the jobs that the American film indutsry won't do."
Regardless of what is being downloaded and burnt to disc, the longevity of a burnt disc is vastly inferior to that of a pressed disc.
Why is it a challenge? Because at 1080i/1080p resolution, you can see physical flaws in a body very clearly. This will mean adult movie stars may have to undergo expensive cosmetic surgery and other skin treatments far more often, and that could raise the cost of production quite a bit. We could see a fast weeding out of adult entertainment companies to those who can afford to pay for a adult movie star to get the appropriate surgery in addition to paying for the enormous expense of high-definition mastering equipment (hi-def cameras, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray mastering systems, and so on). This is where you could see a company like Playboy Enterprises become a major player in the adult film industry because Playboy could afford to buy equipment for the new formats and afford to pay for making an adult movie star look "good" in the new format. Indeed, Playboy has publicly said they want to be one of the first companies to release HD-DVD/Blu-Ray adult-oriented videos on a large scale.
dude. CGI. If they can make smeegle, they can surely make ultimate girl. Endless possibilities. New challenges for blue screen actors, LOL. This is where someone with the sensibilities of Andy Warhol would come in handy. "I must put life in the .... blue screen!" Yeeech!
Nope, CGI won't help things. You're forgetting that CGI is still a very expensive proposition, and it would be just cheaper for an adult movie star to undergo cosmetic surgery and/or other skin treatments (e.g., Botox) to "look" better in high-definition videos.
True for now. But at some point in the foreseeable future, Hollywood will make a movie without actors, but which does not appear to be animated. Smeagol, King Kong -- right now, these are big-ticket one-of-a-kind characters. But the day will come when a studio wants to make a movie with a 20-year-old Tom Cruise -- and it will be able to do that.
But Hollywood will not be the first to master the art of live-action films without actors, porn will do it first.
At the rumored rates of AIDS/HIV/STD's in that industry, cosmetic surgery may not be the only thing they face.
i wonder though, how of "Hollywood's" profits/employment/industry is "regular movies, regular TV, and pron production.
Wouldn't be surprised if the number of Hollywood types actually employed (including actors themselves) was a large fraction in that industry.
Historically, two sectors have always been at the forfront, blazing the trail in new communications and media: porn and evangelism - the etreme ends of the content spectrum.
Hi-def porn is here already. I get a high-def movie channel from my cable company, and late on Friday and Saturday nights they run 16:9 widescreen hi-def hardcore porn. Or so I've heard ;)
It is one of the facts of life since the Fall that just as most other technological advances are driven by war, advances in media are driven by pornography (videotape format standardization on VHS was due to the porn industry's preference, most photographic supplies sold in Victorian England were to pornographers, lewd novels were the mainstays of the early printing industry, just post-Guttenberg, . . .).
Sooner or later other entertainment, and even edifying video content, will also be available for burning onto DVD from the internet.
I don't know about the rates of other STD's, but the rate of HIV in the porn industry is astonishingly low, all things considered. They had about 3 people that became infected a couple years back and that made the national news and even prompted the California legislature to try to regulate the industry. This is pretty astounding when you consider the amount of promiscuous, unprotected and unsafe sex that's going on in the porn industry.
What they do right is to test every one of the performers once a month using a test for the actual HIV virus rather than just HIV antibodies. The standard tests that most clinics and doctors give check for HIV antibodies and can take up to three months for an infected person to test positive.
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