[ Sajith M ]

Celebs & Gadget Gossips! reports

German Heise has interviewed Joone the founder of Digital Playgrounds at the AVN 2007 show in Las Vegas. Joone says actually said last year he is committed to Blu-ray. Now they announced four HD DVD titles in the United States. In the interview Joone says he was forced to use HD DVD, because no Blu-ray disc manufacturer would make his discs, because Sony was against it and they would loose their license.

Moral issues aside, I think this is a bad business move. At the end of the day watching porn or not is a personal issue (you watch if you want to, don’t watch if you don’t want to) and should have nothing to do with the terms on which a technology is licensed. In this case my impression is that the licensing terms dictates that it cannot be used for porn. And (like it or not) the $37b porn industry can decide the winners of this format war simply by choosing one format over the other.

Incidentally in the Betamax VS VHS war, VHS was the winner for some pretty good reasons like lower licensing costs, longer recording length despite Betamax being perceived as the (technically) better format. However, the one factor that is rarely mentioned is the availability of porn in VHS vs. unavailability of porn in Betamax format. Or as Robert Scoble said Many many VHS sales were decided on because of the much greater availability of adult entertainment in the VHS format.

Seems Microsoft learnt it’s lesson long back. They had originally restricted the original X-BOX from playing DVD’s that carried a porn marker, but were wise enough to remove the restriction in the X-BOX 360.

Looks like Sony has some way to go before it will have a successful format at hand. For consumers though its probably good news as they not only need to choose for HD DVD models and not bother with Blu-ray format.

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Tagged with: Blu-ray, format war, HD-DVD, porn, Technology