Porns Next Web Move Spooks Hollywood

As the Internet transforms into a high-speed content medium, video distributors, eyeing a world without middlemen and hardware costs, debate about the methods by which to serve up content. At a loss, they turn to the experts – they ask the porn guys.

Adult entertainment company Vivid Entertainment Group, reports latimes.com, will begin selling downloads of movies online that can be burned to DVD for living room home-theatre use.

Hollywood closely watches the porn industry, a long considered pioneer in the use of emerging technologies, for direction of the next great media push. Porn was the first to adopt home video; the first to see the potential of the Internet for content distribution; and now will be the first to make downloads DVD transferable.

“The simple fact is porn is an early adopter of new media,” Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto told latimes.com. “If you’re trying to get something established you’re going to privately and secretly hope and pray that the porn industry likes your medium.”

To this point Hollywood has been reluctant to provide the ability to burn movies to DVD for fear of piracy. But given the pornography industry’s success rate in making new distribution techniques work, it may be a matter of time before mainstream movie makers decide to do the same.

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