Several people have been asking me to comment on the story below which we’ll definitely be talking about on today’s weekly radio show a couple hours away. Since there is some tech crossover into something I’ve been talking a lot about lately, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, I’ll hit the topic here briefly.

No Blu-ray disk manufacturer would make their disks because Sony doesn’t want porn on Blu-ray (just as with Betamax) … the porn industry overwhelmingly favors HD-DVD because it’s much cheaper and easier to produce. As noted in the tgdaily article, porn was a huge factor in VHS winning the VHS/Beta format wars even though many people don’t like to acknowledge it.

In short, I think Sony is conceding HD-DVD a major victory in the format wars with an anti-porn stance. Aren’t they going to have — or don’t they already have — writeable Blu-Ray drives? When they do have offer those, then how is Sony going to prevent people from storing whatever they want there? Putting adult content on any format, whether it be floppy disk, CD, etc has and will always happen as long as the format is viable. Heck if you do some searching around, and I’m not going to link it up, there are people (no, not me Toby) who get their freak on checking out ASCII erotic art.

I can understand companies like Sony discouraging the adult industry from using the format and hopefully that is what Sony has really been saying here, but outright denying them is business suicide (and considering the First Amendment, questionable legally). This might make the anti-adult crowd happy with Sony, but it’s going to drive a lot of people that otherwise are neutral on the two formats and who like viewing adult material in the privacy of their homes to HD-DVD.

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• Adult websites won’t go quietly into the night