Archive for January, 2007
Debbie does HD-DVD; no porn on your PS3
The battle for next-generation DVD is over, and HD-DVD is the winner: Sony is refusing to work with adult films who might want to put porn on Blu-Ray. It’s VHS versus Betamax all over again, with the no-porn format (Betamax) getting a sound spanking from the pro-porn one (VHS).
Everybody knows that when it comes to rival video formats, the one that doesn’t have screwing is screwed (and that’s probably the first of several really bad porn-related jokes I’m going to make in this post). But while that was undoubtedly true in the dim and distant past, when the only way to get porn movies was on video cassettes, I’m not convinced it’s the case now.
The big question is whether porn really matters to video formats now. Porn is certainly big business - most estimates suggest that the revenue from the US adult industry is around $3 billion per year more than Hollywood - but it’s increasingly an internet business. All the major producers have an internet presence, and they’ve been at the forefront of pushing both marketing and technology. Online porn offers instant gratification, whereas disc-based formats don’t. Online shopping certainly makes porn purchasing easier and guarantees that you can get the title you actually want, but you still have to wait for the disc to arrive - whereas broadband means even high-res downloads are quick.
I’d be interested to see the figures for pornography purchasing, because my gut feeling is that download sales are rampant while disc sales are losing their thrust. There are some stats out there: according to PC Magazine, porn sales and rentals (of discs and tapes, not downloads) fell 15% in 2006 and account for 28% of the adult market. I haven’t been able to find stats on streaming sites, download rentals and the like.
There’s also the issue of whether high definition is important to porn purchasers. As far as I’m aware all next-gen DVD players can play plain old DVD anyway, and many of them upsample the DVD signal for better picture quality. Hi-def DVDs will be considerably more expensive than plain old DVD discs, and of course there’s also the issue of whether hi-def offers too much detail. I guess that depends on whether porn viewers are like movie geeks - look at the pixels on that! - or whether reality might be a little too realistic for them. As Moriarty writes on Ain’t It Cool News:
I’m not sure I’d want to see someone like Ron Jeremy in high definition. There are, after all, things you can’t unsee.
Incidentally, the post title’s a little misleading: apparently the sequel to the legendary Debbie Does Dallas will be coming out on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for maximum market penetration. Perhaps porn producers will swing both ways until one format becomes dominant.
Zune: welcome to the stupid
Remember Zune’s DRM-crippled wireless sharing system? Apparently the record labels have crippled it further. According to Engadget:
It appears Sony Music and Universal Music Group are marking certain artists of theirs as “prohibited” for sharing, meaning that just because you’ve paid for a song, and even managed to find another Zune user on the planet Earth, doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily get to beam that JoJo track to another Zune via WiFi magics. In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it’s roughly 40-50 percent of artist that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there’s no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail.
That’s the same Universal Music Group that gets a royalty on each Zune sold, and the same song sharing system that’s expressly designed to make people buy music and which is promoted as a key feature of Zune. Nice one, record labels.
Get a brain! Morans*
This is wonderful: Amazon user reviews of Orwell’s 1984.
“If you like reading about old people think they are beating the system by saving a PAPERWEIGHT, then by all means…”
“You might like this book if you are interested in predicting the future and you can read lots of difficult words and know what they mean.”
“This is the second time I’ve been forced to read this book for aclass, and I have to ask, “What’s the point?” Maybe if you live in a country that’s a monarchy, this book’s worth reading, but this is *America*, ok? The whole reason we live in a democracy is so that we the people don’t have to worry about things like this.”
(Via Charles Arthur’s blog)
* One of the greatest internet cliches ever.
“Let’s shoot the messenger!” say record labels
It’s not exactly a shock, but in the next few weeks the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is going to change the focus of its anti-piracy activities. Instead of suing the people who actually trade songs illegally, the IFPI wants to sue ISPs. It’s a bit like suing the Royal Mail over chain letters, or BT over annoying calls from your ex.
Naturally, the IFPI really doesn’t want to do this. It would much rather sue individual file sharers and run the risk of heavy legal costs if prosecutions are unsuccessful, run the risk of suing people who can’t afford to pay anyway, and run the risk of its inflated claims for damages being exposed in court (typically the record labels want thousands of pounds per song, but the wholesale price of a single digital track is around 70p).
It’ll work like this: the IFPI will contact an ISP and say “Bobby’s file sharing. You must kill his account or we will sue you for very many pounds.” If ISPs don’t immediately cave in, they face very expensive legal action. Because they’re companies, it doesn’t matter whether Bobby is guilty or innocent; they’ll have to pay the legal costs anyway.
As you can probably guess, I’m not a fan of this move - not least because it means the IFPI no longer needs to actually prove in court that someone’s file sharing. In essence it’s extortion: kill this account or we’ll make you pay.
ISPs are mere carriers, and with some very few exceptions they shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of their users (the exceptions are obvious wrongs such as child pornography; I agree that ISPs should block such things, but it’s up to government to mandate that). Effectively the IFPI wants to enlist ISPs as its unpaid policemen.
I’ve said before, there’s an easy answer to this: blanket licensing for file sharing. ISPs pay royalties to the record labels and in return, their users can file share to their heart’s content; ISPs would then recover the money by charging higher access fees. If you don’t want to pay those fees, your ISP blocks the relevant ports for file sharing applications, bittorrent and so on or simply applies a very low monthly bandwidth cap. Yes, that means the odd legit file sharer won’t be able to file share without paying extra, but that’s not necessarily unfair: if you’re sharing Linux ISOs or whatever you’re using serious bandwidth anyway.
There’s another answer, too: stop selling downloads with bloody DRM. Then people like me would actually buy digital downloads instead of file sharing today and then buying the CD when it finally comes out.
Podcastic
I spent a bit of time blathering yesterday for .net magazine’s inaugural podcast, which should appear on Monday (22nd January). It’s hosted by Paul Boag of boagworld.com and in addition to a clearly cold-ridden me, it also features people who actually know what they’re talking about: .net ed Dan Oliver and web experts Andy Budd and Chris Heilmann. For the first episode we’ve blabbed about the iPhone and whether it’s going to change the mobile internet, the problems of HTML handling in Outlook 2007, how to get work in web development and who would win in a fight between Sugababes and Girls Aloud. One of those bits may be a lie.
In best web 2.0 style we’re making it up as we go along, so any comments - what you’d like the podcast to cover, who you’d like it to feature - would be very welcome (via the .net site, not here - I’m a mere contributor).
FFS: 1&1 email’s borked again
Big delays on the email front again. This is getting beyond a joke.
Celebrity Big Brother: the final word
“Big Brother is not racist, says BNP”.
Things what I have bought and are good
- The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Bleak!
- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for the Xbox 360. Fun!
- On The Wealth of Nations, by PJ O’Rourke. Witty!
Lovely
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Slimming world
Nice (accidental) bit of page layout on the Sun site today:
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