Porn seems to be on the forefront of most major technological advancements that come around the bend, like the early adoption of the information superhighway. But did the HD era help or hurt this medium of entertainment?
Surely when you think about buying a new HD television, you may have adult films in mind, but Super Bowl Sunday moves more TVs in that regard. What about streaming technology? Music and radio had a bigger hand in popularizing that form of access to content. Did porn fall behind when HD technology came along? There are many pointers to that possibility. Unfortunately, the advent of piracy became more accessible as technology advanced in that part of that picture. But there are still definite advantages of the digitization of smut.
We’ll start at the beginning with online video. When I covered the 90s era of porn in a previous blog here on HotMovies, I broke down how the internet had a hand in making physical formats obsolete. The common consumer didn’t need to buy DVDs as much when the internet came along and made things easier to watch on a computer. This was helped with the birth of streaming video. Video coding standards were studied and developed all the way back in 1974 when lossy compression gave way to this practical method of displaying video over networks. All that meant was using data encoding to reduce size making it possible for most computers to display video over the internet. This helped in sending multimedia across vast networks to create the internet we see today. This is commonly referred to as “streaming content.”
Back in 1993, the first film streamed on the internet was called Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees.
These were days where bandwidth limitations only allowed a fraction of the frames per second we can now stream today. So you can imagine looping gif-like snippets of porno as a limited method of streaming on your screen in very blurry quality. Ironically, GIFs have regained popularity in today’s meme-centric world. In the early days of the internet, watching the same sex position loop over and over again was really all you saw when you were watching video, or they were cut up into smaller parts from a much larger film to compensate for the lack of bandwidth. Aspect-ratio limitations didn’t help either. Remember AVI files from the early 90s?
Downloading full videos was a natural progression in this video-centric age. Various sizes and qualities varied upon how you downloaded the video, and where you downloaded them from. If you join a porn site with a membership, you are commonly given the option to download the video at varying qualities. These qualities are due to current video coding formats. Examples of this are MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 which require a video codec to play them. The higher the quality of the video means a larger file size to store on a hard drive. Once High Definition came into play, the file sizes grew. Any image processed with more than 480 vertical lines on a grid of pixels are considered HD. 4K video has eight million pixels. Pixels are like a small grid of bits creating a larger digital image with rows and columns. 4K is four times what 1080p can display. 4K, if downloaded, increases the need for more storage space since they are very large files. To put it into perspective 780p is 1,280 X 720 pixels while full HD in 1080 is 1,920 X 1,080.
While streaming 4K is a possibility, the availability of options in this digital age dictates the type of viewer or collector you can be. Some people still have DVD collections to this day and don’t need to worry about buying extra drives to store files. Just streaming video means you don’t have to worry about storing DVDs or files on a hard drive. What kind of porn viewer or collector are you? We can go through both downloading HD videos and streaming them to discern that.
Through Digital Download:
Downloading files to store on your own devices requires some space, but not the physical space you’re thinking of. Compared to actually owning racks upon racks of DVDs, downloaded digital files only need to be stored on hard drives as files in a directory. This is the advantage of portability once downloaded to a device like a thumb drive or an external hard drive for storage. Your only limitations are the capacity of your drives or how many times you are allowed to download the actual file from the provider. In the early days, it was all about smaller files called megabytes. Realistically, HD videos go to up more than a few thousand megabytes. A thousand megabytes is one gigabyte.
Most websites show you the different formats to download in and their corresponding file size. Here at HotMovies, an example can be seen in our Tushy RAW selection, which allows you to download the file as a clip. You can use your Reward Points, some of your minutes that you’ve purchased, or pay for the clip outright to be able to download it to your digital collection on your PC. You’re limited to download it three times, so make sure you have it stored somewhere you remember.
This is what the menu looks like if you want to buy the clip so you can start downloading it to your PC. This is the Naomi Swan scene form Anal Models Vol. 5.
Saving Space Through Streaming:
Streaming video only takes up space in the form of internet bandwidth. So you don’t need a DVD rack or any storage space on your PC. The only requirement is a stable internet connection and some purchased minutes if you plan to watch it here with us at HotMovies. And if you don’t have much bandwidth to give, you’re still covered because most sites allow different options to stream in. Here at HotMovies you have ability to stream at Ultra HD, which is 4K, down to a medium quality of video for slower connections. The higher the quality of video, the more demand on your internet’s bandwidth.
If you want to watch My Stepson is Evil, for example, you can click the toolbar below the movie’s icon to browse the different qualities you can stream it in.
Virtual Reality: The Future is Now
While looking back at some of the classics, the vision of the future was much different—albeit a fantasy—but very close to what we have now with the likes of Virtual Reality. Zane Entertainment’s zany take on the future of porn in Depraved Fantasies 6. It’ss an example of this sci-fi sex vision from back in 1998. You see Kyle Stone strap Christina Angel down to a table after she was zapped into a virtual-sex world by a masked user connected to his computer. His medical examination is really an experiment in cybernetic sex, as you see Kyle wearing latex gloves with close-ups of him fingering Christina Angel’s naked pussy. His sexy assistant that partakes in this edgy endeavor is Malitia. The soundtrack is industrial music to give a futuristic tone, with a set made to look as if they are in a giant electronic device made of hanging wiring and flashing lights. The dated special effects still pushed forth a vision of the cyber world they thought would come to be, or at least a fantasy of it.
Today, Virtual Reality is a viable medium to consume porn, yet it’s a pricey one compared to just streaming and downloading. The goggles used to engage the viewer do have affordable options though, so this ever-evolving medium can still catch on in popularity. There are actual pornos filmed for this type of viewing technology with the idea of immersing the user visually. Whorecraft VI: Sexy Nymphos’ Quest for the Cock God is just one of the examples of VR porn. The idea is to capture the taste of the adult-gamer culture while giving the high-end, technological vision of VR: a match made in nerd heaven!
With all this talk of sex robots around the corner and AI constantly in the discussion, who knows where the future will really take us? One thing is true though: porn is always there for each one of these technological advancements. Sex culture has an open-minded approach, which ensures user-friendly mediums for tech-savvy fans from all walks of life. We’ve come a long way from what the “cybersex” really meant back in the day. This was just trading sexually fueled texts back and forth through messaging applications. Now, social media directly connects us with sex workers with a click of the mouse. We can only guess what advancements come next in this XXX digital era that keeps advancing.
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