| Started off about a month back with Vivid's announcement of it's service to allow members to download and burn movies to DVD. Quotes from the LAtimes article : "Los Angeles-based Vivid will start selling burnable movies May 8 through online movie service CinemaNow.....Vivid, producer of such titles as "Bad Wives" and "Generation Sex," will offer 30 downloadable videos for about $19.95 apiece that include everything that is on a standard DVD ¡X cover art, scene navigation, bonus material and deleted scenes. The finished disc will be copy-protected to deter piracy."
So, in a week's time, you can download, burn and start collecting hardcore porn DVD's, legally. This is a confluence of two trends - Porn at the forefront of technology and the tussle between Television and Computers.
Porn as a trailblazer for technology? Oft written and mostly true. Reason? We've got little to lose. Porn customers ain't going nowehere. Iffy technologies, piracy concerns and most important - Whether the technology will be adapted by people all over the world - These things matter very little to the Porn industry. The porn surfer is going to keep coming back for more, whatever the porn comnpanies do, or don't do. So what we do, is try out new things and when some of them do work, we're trialblazers. Mainstream companies do not have this luxury, as one wrong move can spell the end of a company and a technology. Very few companies, other than Google and Microsoft, have the power to transform surfing habits. So it's left to porn to do the pioneering.
Coumputers have the advantage of storage, interaction with users, speed and a vast variety, not to mention that a lot of it is for free. A television, on the other hand, is still stuck in the 1990's. Technology for television has changed very little, except for Tivo. The integration of TV, conmputers, broadband internet and DVD burning has hardly been explored, mainly because TV is lagging behind. Right now, people have to choose between television and computers. The younger generation is moving away very fast from television to the internet. It's inevitable that some of the content on televison will emigrate to coumpters and the internet. Though it still does not have the reach of television, the gap is rapidly closing.
But as of now, let's focus on watching movies on television. You download off the net, burn the movie on to DVD and watch it at your pleasure. What's going to happen next is that the whole process moves towards complete automation. Meaning that you select the movie for download on your television, which will be internet enabled, and the rest of the process is completely automatic and you end up with a movie on DVD, ready for viewing on your wide-screen televison, without ever touching a computer.
Ultimately, what you will have is a split wide-screen monitor, with a mouse and keyboard, split into TV and an internet window. The Television runs in the background, while you surf the net in a small window on the split screen. DVD burning, storage on the harddisk, live programming, sports, news, the internet bill - everything will be bundled into one package.
And remember, it all started with some horny porn surfers who wanted DVD's to watch on a TV, without having to go to the neighbourhood adult store.
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