The Future, Today: Porn Downloads For Your TV

Exciting news for the porn industry. Yesterday, Vivid Entertainment, in conjunction with the online movie site Cinema Now, announced that they will begin selling burnable versions of their movies that can be played on any screen.

"Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff," said Michael Greeson, founder of the consumer electronics think tank the Diffusion Group. "The rest of Hollywood stands back and lets the pornography industry work out all the bugs."

Right now, when you burn a DVD on your computer you can't watch it on your DVD player. The reason is something called CSS or 'content scrambling system'. Cinema Now and Vivid have bagged CSS and are instead using a 'one-time burn' proprietary software. Click, buy, burn, watch. It's pretty cool when you think about it.

Now, Vivid Entertainment already makes enough money, so this is definitely not meant to be a free plug for them. They've all but cornered the market on couples porn, and I just read that they can afford to sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into a production and still turn a profit. So, fuck them.

What's really great about all this is what it means for small time, aspiring pornographers (you and yours truly) who want to reach as wide an audience as possible with a user-friendly product. Now we have the means to make our little 50 or 60 minute features and sell the finished product (special features, cover art and all) directly to the consumer. Eco-friendly production, marketing and distribution all from your living room. Wow.

It's not that the DIY potential wasn't there before, it's just going to be that much easier now. This is technology allowing us to, as Robert Rodriguez puts it, create at the speed of thought.