Porn Industry Ready To Drop Flash 249
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting new angle to the ongoing Flash-HTML5 debate. Digital Playground, one of the major adult film studios, said it would drop Flash today if all browsers were HTML5-ready (*cough*, IE8, *cough*). The company's founder said, 'Flash brings everything to a crawl and has an impact on battery life. With HTML5, there is no reason to show our content in Flash.' Digital Playground also indicated that it does not expect 3-D to gain mass acceptance any time soon."
And if my aunt had a dick she'd by my uncle... (Score:5, Informative)
I work in the Adult Industry on a Content Management System [elevatedx.com] for paysites. We just demonstrated support for the iPad at the recent Xbiz show using H.264.
It's fine and dandy that one company has proclaimed that they'd get rid of Flash given the chance. That doesn't say much for the rest of the industry, now, does it?
I know there are a lot of Open Source Advocates on Slashdot, but let's face it: Paysite operators are in the game to maximize their profits. This is done by:
a) Reaching as many people and devices as possible.
b) Decreasing bandwidth
c) Minimizing disk space and hardware.
They don't care about the war between WebM and H.264. They only care about having their sites work with as many people as possible. In this case, HTML5 brings iPad support to their sites.
The problem here ultimately is that the codec war with HTML5 is still undecided. If you're going to use HTML5's video element exclusively, you're going to end up being FORCED to use two formats of video for all the browsers - one for WebM and one for H.264.
That's all well and good, but multiple formats takes up space. Granted a lot of pay sites offer multiple download options like WMV, DivX and Quicktime, but when it comes to watching a full movie in a browser, only one format is needed here - H.264. Let the browsers that support H.264 use the video tag. Let browsers that don't use a Flash player backup.
This still won't change after WebM has support within Flash because of the iPhone and iPad. As the mobile arena heats up, WebM will start to appear lacking without Apple support. Even though the iPhone is a small percentage of the total phone market, it says a lot when the CEO has one and wants his websites to work on it.
So in sum - flash isn't going anywhere. It will remain as a backup player for 5 years mininum.
Re:never gonna work (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Porn Industry Ready To Drop Flesh (Score:3, Informative)
Hopefully never, at least fully. I'd much prefer real, natural-looking girls to the cosmetic surgery-enhanced freaks that some of the porn stars have turned into today, and would be very disappointed to see it turn into a bunch of Sims-style "animated" bullshit.
Re:never gonna work (Score:3, Informative)
This is a popular meme with no factual basis. It began with the claim that the porn industry chose VHS over Betamax and that's why Betamax lost, but that is not the reason it lost. People just like to repeat this because it sounds ironic and amusing to explain to people that some taboo industry is the driver of technology, but the truth is that there is no historical basis to make that claim.
iPad ready porn (Score:3, Informative)
Many porn sites are already iPad ready. I've heard (cough cough) that the experience is much better.
http://youporn.com/ [youporn.com]
http://pornhub.com/ [pornhub.com]
http://extremetube.com/ [extremetube.com]
A big part of this is how cheap and easy it is to do HTML5+H.264 video. The video editing tools all have H.264 encoders, including batch encoding at least in Final Cut, and a standalone encoder is $29. Of course any HTML coder can learn the video tag. Flash is unreasonably complicated by comparison and also $599 a seat.
Re:I still don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
Because instead of having a Turing-capable, complete independent virtual machine sitting in a browser just to look at a few pictures, I can just have a "link" to a bog-standard video that plays just like the old "embed" tags for a standardised video codec that people can include direct in the browser. Instead of the security nightmare of constant Flash updates, forced toolbar installations, breakage of old Flash sites just because you upgrade to new Flash versions, integration with webcams, microphones and other shit I can just have: a "video" tag that specifies... well.. the URL of a video, that any player *I* choose can integrate with my web browser and play.
It also doesn't slow to a dead crawl just because you load up a couple of sites that have video on them because everything is fighting to run its own code to show a "play" button on top of the video in a fancy 3D, alpha-blended, anti-aliased, sound-effect generated way. Basically, it makes everything simpler, like back in the day when you could just say "embed this MIDI" (although that was a hideous disaster, admittedly) and stops relying on the need for a non-portable, third-party, closed source plugin that spends 90% of its time NOT showing video.
Re:never gonna work (Score:3, Informative)
Re:iPad ready porn (Score:4, Informative)
Looking at it the other way, Flash SWFs import the very same h.264 file that you can serve raw. Adding h.264 support is as easy as serving up the file you already had without the Flash wrapper. It's a no-brainer.
Re:never gonna work (Score:3, Informative)
No factual basis? The porn industry did not choose VHS. Sony banned porn on Betamax. This is a known fact, and they almost did the same thing with Blu-Ray. If you think porn was not a factor, then obviously you never saw those walled off areas in just about every video rental store in the 1980s. Rows apon rows of VHS porn, and not a beta tape in sight!
Sony on Betamax:
http://www.mediacollege.com/video/format/compare/betamax-vhs.html
Sony on Blu-ray:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197000093
(This one is called "Sony denies preventing porn on Blu-Ray". Uh huh, just like they denied putting rootkits on PCs.)