AVN: Will Blu-ray walk into the anti-porn trap?
Since January 10 the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the largest trade fair of the United States' pornography industry, has been taking place at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas right next to the consumer-electronics trade fair CES. Despite the Blu-ray Disc Association having, on account of current forecasts for player sales, only recently at the CES declared itself the winner in the battle to succeed the DVD the decisive thrust in the fight to the death between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD may yet for all that come from the AVN. There Joone, founder of the company Digital Playground and director of extremely popular HD porn movies, declared that his company would from next week on be publishing movies on HD DVD on a regular basis.

This is a U-turn for Joone, who at last year's AVN event had declared his support for the Blu-ray Disc format. Asked about his change of attitude by heise online the director responded: "Sony wants me to publish my films on HD DVD." He then went on to explain that he had in fact wanted to publish his movies on Blu-ray Disc, but that all Blu-ray Disc copying facilities in the United States had refused to cooperate. The companies had unanimously declared that Sony had threatened to withdraw their Blu-ray licenses should they stoop to making HD copies of pornographic films, Joone said. Even though he would have liked to supply with his movies the predominantly male group of Playstation 3 players he had been forced by events, he declared, to switch to HD DVD. The game console has the ability to play Blu-ray Discs built into it. The director said he was puzzled by Sony's attitude, which, he noted, had also turned out to be counterproductive in the case of Betamax.

As a consequence Digital Playground now intends to release HD DVD products at a rapid rate: Thus between now and the first week of February the company, with "Island Fever 3," "Pirates," "Teen America" and "Island Fever 4," will launch onto the US market as many as four titles. Thereafter up to the end of the year the company will aim to release four HD-DVD titles a month. While "Island Fever 3" and "Pirates" are combined discs with an HD-DVD and a DVD side to them, "Teen America" and "Island Fever 4" are pure HD DVDs. Each disc will probably cost 5 US dollars more than its DVD counterpart.

The movie "Island Fever 3," which was shot on Tahiti and Bora Bora, has already been seen to run flawlessly as a WMV HD-DVD; despite a playing time of 3 hours and 20 minutes its successor, which as DVD is two-disc-edition material, is said to fit on a single HD DVD without any loss of quality. The fairly sumptuously produced "Pirates" has even received an award as the most commercially successful porn DVD of 2006. For more than a year the work, of which a G-rated version was released later, managed to hold on to a prominent position in the US porn DVD charts.

" But Adult Video News (AVN), trade magazine for the adult video industry, recently released its first-ever statistical look at the market. It pegged 2005 adult video sales and rentals in the US at $4.24 billion. The Video Software Dealers Association, trade association for home video sales and rentals – not including adult – said US consumers spent $24.3 billion buying and renting DVDs and VHS cassettes.That would mean adult sales and rentals in the US represented 14.9% of all US home video sales and rentals in 2005."

Despite the Blu-ray Disc Association having, on account of current forecasts for player sales, only recently at the CES declared itself the winner in the battle to succeed the DVD