HDTV: Too much information?

Last year I made some obser­va­tions about the role the pornog­ra­phy indus­try has played in the estab­lish­ment of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies. I won’t go into detail here, so here’s the link to the orig­i­nal post if interested.

I couldn’t help but think back to that little gem when, brows­ing the NY Times this morn­ing, I found a great arti­cle enti­tled: In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Defi­n­i­tion Could Be a View Too Real. The upshot of the arti­cle is that, despite lead­ing early adop­tion of that tech­nol­ogy, produc­ers are fast reach­ing the conclu­sion that HD-porn really isn’t that great an idea.

You could prob­a­bly take all you need to know from the arti­cle by read­ing a single quote, taken from one Ms ‘Stormy Daniels’:

I?‘m not 100% sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD

Good point, and one which leads to some inter­est­ing questions.

Since Sony still stands by their policy not to mass-produce porno­graphic movies (the policy that prompted the adult enter­tain­ment indus­try to adopt HD over Blu-ray in the first place), many have spec­u­lated that this would lead to HD domi­nat­ing in the same way that VHS killed Beta­max in the early 80’s. Person­ally I think a better ques­tion is whether either format is really that much of an improve­ment (in terms of viewer enjoy­ment) on the status quo.

If you look at the big new media tech­nolo­gies of the 20th Century, they’ve all given us some­thing new that we really wanted: 8mm let us take movies home; VHS let us make home movies with­out having to use a film lab; ditto the Polaroid’s impact on photog­ra­phy, and to a greater extent the digi­tal camera; the Walk­man let us listen on the move; and the mobile phone meant that lonely people didn’t have to stay at home all night wait­ing for the phone to ring (now they can do that anywhere). What previ­ously un-fulfilled need is either new DVD format really meeting?

A good ques­tion to ask with any new toy, I suppose: Just because it’s bigger, faster, louder, brighter — does that make it better? Some­times, but not always. In the mean­time I think I’ll stick with my regu­lar old DVD player till my box-set of the Star Wars tril­ogy turns to dust. Or I do.