CES 2008 and the Other Show in Las Vegas

I didn't visit the AVN show while at CES, but your knife holder struck a familiar chord. Sure enough it's the same one that thinkgeek.com (where I get most of my birthday and christmas presents from - hurrah for wishlists) has had for a while, for a lower price too - www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/gear/86dd/ .

Doing some googling, it's clear that there exists some "internet controversy" over whether pr0n was a factor. But I haven't seen one iota of evidence to support that conclusion. It's too bad, because it *is* a better story -- even if it isn't true. ;)

I think VHS won over Beta because you could put two hours of material on VHS when you could only put one hour on the initial version of Beta. Therefore, you needed two Beta cartridges for each pre-recorded movie and that didn't fly, despite Beta's reportedly superior picture. Although Sony eventually fixed that problem with Beta, it was too late.

I wonder if the whole HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war could have been foreshortened if Sony had not taken the no-adult-video stand. I don't know if it's apocryphal or true, but I've always heard that adult content has been an important driver in technology adoption: VHS won over beta in part because of adult content, adult content (still images) was a major impetus in the initial adoption of CD-ROM drives, adult content drove DVD (at least some features, like "angles"), adult content is a major factor in Internet traffic, etc. I don't know if any of those are true, but they are certainly "truthy." :)

I was careful to keep it from being off-color commentary. :D

Moe, thanks for adding some well-informed color commentary.

re: Adult Video and CES: I understand that Sony has taken a stand: No "adult video" on Blu-Ray. It may be a commercially expensive decision. And not inconsequential. The relationship between CES and adult video has a history. In the 1980s, I was in consumer electronics and attended CES yearly (twice a year in the early days as they had a summer show in Chicago). When home video began to rise, adult video was its enabler. As with technologies before and since, purveyors of risque content were early adopters. The consumer electronics industry, and the CES, then run by the EIA, were increasingly uncomfortable with it. But the adult video makers were EIA members and had seniority in booth space. And many of the dealers who visited CES for consumer electronics gear also sold videos. So the partnership endured. CES first separated the adult entertainment booths, then placed them in a separate hall, before finally banning them from the show. They did this with some pain, because they were giving up an enormous funding source. I imagine the timing of the AVN Expo stems from the fact that sellers of their material still also sell consumer electronics, so the same dealers are still able to accomplish more business with one trip. Anyway, it goes back further than ten years. I think adult entertainment is interesting with relationship to Leibson's Law in that it has persistently remained both disruptive and pervasive. :)

Beautiful!!! I want it!