Custom Pornography for a Consumerist Age

USA Today reports that the pornography industry is ready to sell ready-to-play videos for televisions that are downloaded from a personal computer and then burned directly onto a DVD.

From the article:

Hollywood has been tiptoeing its way toward letting consumers buy a movie online, burn it onto a DVD and watch it on a living-room TV.

While the studios hesitate, the adult film industry is taking the leap. Starting Monday, Vivid Entertainment says it will sell its adult films through the online movie service CinemaNow, allowing buyers to burn DVDs that will play on any screen, not just a computer.

It’s another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat.

“Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff,” said Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, a consumer electronics think tank in Plano, Texas.

“The rest of Hollywood stands back and watches and lets the pornography industry work out all the bugs,” he said.

Those statements are most interesting. The porn industry is taking the lead because it sees a phenomenal profit opportunity for this new product line. Those who want pornographic films on DVD will now be able to secure their purchases over the Internet.

We are again reminded that a market economy is often driven by immoral products, immoral appetites, and immoral businesses. Abstracted from a compelling moral and cultural context, the market can become a mere circus of consumerism. The very fact that the pornography industry drives so much of the economy — and so much of the technological innovation — ought to tell us something.