I’ve read a few articles and talked with a few producers and hear the same story, that DVD sales are plummeting and that web content is the new King of Porn (unless you want to consider the impact of Web 2.0).
But I read this forum and others and there is a voracious appetite for DVD’s over the lower quality web content. Are DVD’s becoming a niche market, are sales really dropping so precipitously? Or maybe people in these forums are old dogs who are not up to the new trick, myself included.
I’m new to porn, aside from the occasional foray unto thehun.com. But since my girlfriend got involved my interest has been aroused. I am dismayed with the quality of video downloads from websites, it is annoying to watch what could be very mind bending (amoung other things) scenes if not for the blur (not to mention the shitty lighting and bad camera work, and jesus, whats with the cut aways to male talent?! But thats for another post). I look forward with rapt anticipation for her DVD releases.
And we all wait patiently for faster download speeds and higher quality resolution.
Harry Wild posts:
I think the trend is to have everything it on a hard drive and hook up your entertainment center.
The computer is the tool for the selection of your media to entertain you.
The hard drives will become much bigger in size; in the future you will have a library of 10,000 movies; 250,000 songs and 5 million pictures at your finger to do what every you like. Plus, pay per view sites will let you have access to over 2 million videos to select from by way of the internet. Download will be much faster like 2 to 3 minutes for a 3 hour movie not the slow pace know but you will have to pay for the download.
I agree that in the near future the DVD will be obsolete. Everything will be available to everyone at any time.
TMDB5 writes:
DVD Porn will never die. Not anytime soon. I really think that in about 10 years we’ll still be seeing DVD porn (instead of just HD and downloads).
Downloadable content will never get bigger than DVD until people can download a movie and burn it to DVD EASILY. In just a few clicks of a mouse. These days you can’t even do that without a ton of work and have the quality be very good. Sure, I know they’re worried about piracy, but half the DVDs out there don’t seem to have copyright protection to begin with. Don’t they have a clue that some people just rent and copy them?
I’ve downloaded lots of movies that claim to be DVD quality, but it’s nowhere near that. I don’t know where they come up with these claims.
I think in 5-10 years we’ll all have a device hooked up to our TV that will download and play movies with just a few clicks of the remote. Porn that is.
They’re already doing that now, but it’s not as common as it should be. Amazon Unbox is pretty cool with HDMI out to TV! Now all they need is a porn version!
Digital cable has instant access porn you can buy and view instantly, but the selection would be soo much better if the offerering was from an internet site.
Until download speed are faster, I won’t even bother. I have 5m cable and I can only download at 100kb/sec? No thanks.
Ramsey posts: "Internet porn is great but it doesn’t beat the future of porn when I think HD-DVD or Blu-ray. That’s the real quality I want to see. Not to mention the fact that I would think internet companies will only offer streams instead of downloads so you can’t own movies and I like the idea of owning movies without goint through the whole DRM thing and stuff like that. I guess I’m more of a porn-collector than a porn-watcher. Watching isn’t enough, I want to own!"
Jack writes: "Talking to a buddy of mine who works in a video store, he says that DVD sales are fine, toy sales are fine, it’s the DVD rentals that are waaaay down. It’s really hurting business. There’s just so many places to get porn online, why bother renting a dvd in a brick and mortar store?"
Nate posts:
Our DVD sales at our stores are great and up versus last year. DVD rentals are down, but that isn’t just a porn problem, that’s across the board, as the cost to buy DVDs went down, more people bought instead of rented. People don’t like having to return shit by a certain date or time. Plus, you can supplement your sales with an exchange or return program or something Netflix-ish.
DVDs won’t be obsolete for quite some time, I think a lot of people prefer to watch their porn on a full size TV, not their cell phone, or computer screen, and you can’t download full screen DVD quality stuff (at least not enough of it), the bandwidth is just too limited right now. Plus the "guy" who prefers watching porn on a tiny screen isn’t a "regular" customer anyway, and it’s the "regular" customers who drive the business. What’s the saying…20% of your customers make up 80% of your business.
With the internet you’ve taken guys who probably weren’t paying for porn before and now they certainly aren’t paying for it when they can get it free from torrent sites so easily. But the real regular customers are still buying, and I don’t know that "sales" are down, just that the margain is razor thin now, much like it is in a lot of other industries, just the porn industry for so long didn’t experience that. When your margain is so thin you have to make it up in volume, and no one can say the volume in this industry has gone down. You aren’t moving as many pieces out the door as you once were but you’ve up’d the release schedule AND there’s 200 companies moving units now as opposed to 25, so I’d say the porn industry as a whole is selling more movies now than ever before.
People want to see the glass half-empty but man, the product is better now than ever, the fan/star interaction is better than ever, the acceptance is better than ever. If there’s any negatives to see it’s that the average working man is underpaid and overworked and has less to spend on porn, the religious right is all up in your business and yeah there are some porn companies that wouldn’t be missed if they went outta business because of the way they flood the market with cheap crap.