Never let it be said that the porn industry isn't on the cutting edge of technology. The genre may lag behind the rest of Hollywood in production value but it leads the way in forward thinking distribution methods. Films by Vivid Entertainment can now be downloaded to your PC in a file format that allows you to burn-it-yourself to a DVD for viewing in a standard DVD player. Customer's who buy a movie through the service will get both a DVD file that can be burned directly to the DVD and a file that can be played back on your computer. It's an idea that has been a long time coming, the traditional movie industry will surely take note.
Vivid's "Burn to DVD" service is distributed through the All Adult Channel website. You can buy each film at a cost of $20 each and only 16 titles currently available in this format from AAC. Vivid has teamed up with CinemaNow who owns the All Adult Channel to offer the movie download service. The Vivid / CinemaNow partnership is breaking new ground on downloadable movies by releasing them through the web the same day they're released to DVD. The All Adult Channel is CinemaNow's testing ground for new distribution methods. If it works for Porn it'll soon become more widely adopted.
The download model is simple. Once you've paid for the download, at the click of a button you burn it to disk automatically. If you must get your porn fix even quicker you can stream the movie to your media player while it's downloading.
Requirements include a Windows PC, DVD writer (obviously) and Windows Media Player 10 or higher. The DVD format is flexible as you can burn to the +R or -R format.
Said Andy Tarczon, VP and co-founder of the Diffusion group, a research consultancy dedicated to digital home consumers:
"Porn has always led the way. No doubt about it, Hollywood comes from a traditional media world. Since a large large percentage of movie revenues come from DVD sales, Hollywood is wary or hesitant to change that model."