Digital Playground enjoying HD revolution

As Hollywood prepares to lower prices of Blu-ray movies to help convince consumers to adopt Blu-ray technology, one industry is doing fine in the current sluggish economy.  Thanks to a large audience across the world, the porn — excuse me, adult entertainment — industry has remained strong, and sales have been impressive.

Even though some consumers are less likely to go out and enjoy dinner and a movie on Friday night, they remain interested in purchasing adult content.   

The customer demand for Blu-ray has been "phenomenal and growing," CDFreaks was told by a Digital Playground spokesperson.

During the Blu-ray, HD DVD content battle, which ended at the start of the year, users anticipated the porn industry successfully choosing a winner the same way it did when betamax and VHS were competing.  But rather than get involved, most large studios either waited until one format won, or released content on both Blu-ray and HD DVD.

Now that the battle is over, movie studios and adult content makers are pushing Blu-ray as the sole high-definition format.  Digital Playground’s recently released movie, Pirates II:  Stagnetti’s Revenge, is expected to give the studio an important sales bump, as the movie has been widely anticipated.

By the end of the month Digital Playground expects to have more than 50 adult content titles available in Blu-ray.  The company had just nine films on Blu-ray in January, but announced in June it would re-release many of its popular titles on Blu-ray to go alongside DVD releases.

Vivid Entertainment released some movies on Blu-ray and HD DVD, so users can choose which format they wanted, and HD DVD actually outsold Blu-ray until Toshiba threw in the towel. 

Besides cheaper discs and ease of use when compared to Blu-ray, HD DVD led the way because Microsoft and Toshiba proved to be more willing to support adult content than Sony.  To clarify, the major problem that faced the adult industry was that Sony didn’t offer any assistance for authoring and replication of the porn movies, because any facility producing Disney movie titles weren’t allowed to make adult content. 

Although the rule is still in place, studios have better access to production facilities and concern over authoring and replication have been alleviated.

Standalone Blu-ray player sales are expected to increase due to lower prices, and adult content on Blu-ray should increase as well.