Porn industry may decide battle between Blu-ray, HD-DVD

Computerworld - 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 major role in determining which of the two blue-laser DVD formats -- Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD -- will be the winner in the battle to replace DVDs for high-definition content.

Ron Wagner, director of IT operations at E! Entertainment Television Inc. 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.

Wagner said that while attending last year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual conference in Las Vegas, more than one panel discussed “several major players in the porn industry going the Blu-ray route.” He said the rivalry between Blu-ray and HD-DVD was also the buzz around NAB 2006 last month.

“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.”

E! Entertainment is using Blu-Ray discs primarily for Sony Corp.’s XDCam applications for acquisition of television programming materials. The television network, which has more than 85 million subscribers to its celebrity gossip and entertainment news, said it is not considering optical formats for long-term data archiving but will stick with magnetic tape for now.

The pornography industry, which generates an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide, has always been a fast leader when it comes to the use of new technology, according to analysts.

Porn studio Digital Playground Inc., which claims to have produced the largest number of high-definition movies in the industry over the past three years, said it is choosing Blu-ray Disc for all of its “interactive” videos because of its greater capacity. It also selected Blue-ray because Sony chose the format for its PlayStation 3 (PS3) box, due out in November.

The co-founder of Chatsworth, Calif.-based Digital Playground, who goes by the one-word name “Joone,” said the fact that Sony chose Blu-ray guarantees his studio an instant home audience.

“PlayStation 3 is going to be the Trojan horse that will get a lot of numbers into the home theater systems -- the living rooms,” said Joone, who is also a movie director. “Technology-wise, we’ve chosen Blu-ray, which doesn’t mean we won’t support both formats ... but as far as having really cool technology and a lot of storage for future-proof, Blu-ray is a good format.”