The Rule of First Adopters: Difference between revisions

* The rise of home videotape machines has often been attributed to the availability of porn. Those wanting to watch it previously had to go to skeevy porno theaters, where everyone around them was doing exactly what you'd think people would be doing in a porno theater and the floors were [[Squick|very sticky]], plus they ran the risk of being seen going into or coming out of the theater. Watching in private has got all sorts of obvious advantages that everyone jumped at. The porno theater industry keeled over and died.

** Notably, the factor believed to have settled the format war between Betamax and VHS was that Sony refused to license Betamax to pornographers. Or, at the very least, licensed it too late to counter the foothold VHS had on the fledgling industry. [http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=2126 Read more about it here.]

*** Unlike with Betamax, Sony isn't the sole owner of Blu-Ray and instead is one of many partners in the Blu-Ray Disc Association. Sony could not actually ban Blu-Ray pornography, but in the early, critical days, they held a de facto monopoly on Blu-Ray manufacturing (Being the first to have large-scale production facilities), and did not peddle their services to the adult media industry

*** Few people remember it these days, but the same dynamic played out in the LaserDisc vs. CED VideoDisc battle in the early 1980s as well. RCA maintained a tight grip on CED manufacturing (there were only 2 plants in the world capable of making CED discs), and a handful of softcore, ''barely''-above-"R"-rated ''Playboy Video Centerfold'' discs were as far as they were willing to go into that territory. Laserdiscs, on the other hand... (Guess which format survived. Go on, guess.) Although only a niche market in the the US, Europe, and Australia; laserdiscs [[Germans Love David Hasselhoff|were the dominant video medium]] in Japan, Hong Kong, and affluent areas of southeast Asia such as Singapore, until the new millenium.