The History & Future of Porn on One Page

[OMG Jim]

I know most of you like the short version so One page should do it!

Many of us remember the good old days of sneaking to the local adult video store to grab the latest VHS of your favorite classic pornstar. Almost like a covert operation for those who?s parents or spouse?s disapproved. Thank goodness for the DVD! Looking just like a CD, porn collections grew tenfold with the ease of transportation and storage.

BAM! Then the Internet comes along and the way we view our precious porn forever changed ? FOR THE BETTER! Ladies and Gentlemen you are experiencing an evolution in time where the real world of porn has by necessity become a staple of the cyberworld and that means tremendous opportunity for ALL those willing to adapt.

Modified From: Technology is Our Friend - By Ernest Greene - XBIZ Online 9/17/07 http://xbiz.com/articles/opinions/84078

Although the porno-techno connection has always been somewhat fraught on both sides of the equation, lately it's become something of an enmeshed co-dependency, seen as menacing from either perspective. Adult DVD manufacturers have come to regard the Internet as the biggest menace since Ed Meese. There's an awkward paradigm shift going on and you can practically hear the gears grinding, to use a somewhat technologically antiquated metaphor.

This has happened before in non-sex media referring to the impact of broadcast TV on feature films. What began as brutal competition eventually evolved into synergy, and I believe the current stresses between physical product and Web-based business models will ultimately do the same. It's time to stop thinking of what XXX producers make as "videos" and start thinking of them as "content." However obvious this assertion may seem, much of this business is having a hard time wrapping its mind around it.

The prevailing view in the early days making dirty pictures was that the VHS box containing them was more crucial to revenues than what was inside. Boxes got bigger and flashier and more expensive even as video products themselves largely abandoned production value in favor of speed and economy. Once the DVD was introduced, out of necessity a new brick and mortar industry marketing strategy followed.

But this is where our thinking about technology needs to advance beyond the question of how we make our products ? whether or not to shoot them in hi-def, for example ? to the way in which we define them as intellectual property. A movie is a movie is a movie, regardless of where and how it's viewed. Its dollar-value is ultimately determined by how many people pay to see it rather than the means by which they do so.

The conundrum presented ascertains that given the lower unit price an incorporeal bit-stream can command when compared to a disk in a clamshell, a whole lot more buyers have to line up to achieve the same return on investment. So the bad news is that a burnable download is still going to price out below a DVD. The good news, however, is that the potential points of purchase for the former are far more numerous than for the latter, and much cheaper to service.

While I still maintain that DVDs are nowhere near extinction and will always remain an important part of the market mix for any sizable production company, high-speed Internet connections are producing an explosion in revenues for telecom providers and, as the technology for streaming video improves and the price of it drops, our dependence on the costly and cumbersome process of authoring, duping, packaging, storing and shipping DVDs will decrease.

The total industry investment in creating content has already been downsized too far in my opinion, resulting in a loss of quality that alienates porn consumers, but the cost of delivering it to larger numbers of potential customers can and will shrink dramatically as the available means of distribution proliferate.

Not only can we sell digital versions of our products off our own company-operated sites, we can move them through theoretically unlimited delivery channels all over the world without having pay a single UPS bill. We can upload them to hotel systems, virtual retail outlets, satellite nets, cell phone hubs and the expanding field hardcore cable operators. That's a lot of gross eyeballs that can be reached.

While digital delivery certainly exacerbates the problem of piracy, that risk is somewhat offset by the diminished legal hassles that accompany interstate shipment of finished pieces. But the best part of the new technological paradigm is that it doesn't have to annihilate the previous one, anymore than TV annihilated feature films. We can still make those big shows and sell them on disc while using clips, streams, serials and niche titles to create brand identity for our companies.

If we're going to stay in business, we need to learn to make new technologies work for us instead of against us. It's not as hard as it sounds.

THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP!