A least one movie studio has seen the future, and in early May, is going to offer film downloads that will burnable to DVDs which will be easily watchable on your TV.
That studio: Vivid Video, one of the leading producers of hardcore porn.
We were less than whelmed when the movie industry started their downloads a few weeks ago. There were just too many obstacles — price, speed, and DRM to name the biggies — and even the fact that they started with relatively high-quality films like King Kong, Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, and Good Luck hasn’t changed any opinions around here. Call us when they get around to The Day The Clown Cried.
The fact that DVDs made from Vivid’s downloads will be playable on your TV puts makes them more consumer-friendly than the films that Hollywood is currently offering. This isn’t surprising, of course: sex has always been a great driver and user of new technology. It’s a little known fact that the second phone call ever was “Mrs. Watson, come here. I want you. I want you bad. I want you now.”
And when you combine sex and money, it equals the fact that the Porn industry has and will always be on the cutting edge of technology, always figuring that low, uh barriers to entry were going to be a key to its success. Still, it isn’t totally clear how successful will downloading TV-friendly pornographic movies from the Internet is going to be.
After all, you may or may not know this, but there is already some porn out there on the Internet that people can download, so Vivid is going to have to find some way to distinguish these particular offerings from the approximately 3,854,098,980,982,762,802,982,234,987 pieces of porn that already exist.
Nevertheless, in terms of legal movie downloads from the Net being consumer-friendly, the score is currently this:
King Kong – 0
King Dong – 1
(Yes, I’m 15. Why do you ask? Also, it’s a legal requirement that all blogs put a “porn movie title joke” in any entry about that industry.)
I also wonder how much heat that CinemaNow — who is distributing the Vivid films right alongside the Hollywood films — is going to get from the bluenose Right. It’s pretty funny that there are actually legal movie downloads that might actually piss off those people off more than Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, And Good Luck.
In the end, I can only hope that Hollywood is really, actually paying attention and follows suit.