Japanese Porn Gets Frisky With Blu-Ray

Japanese porn makers have found a way to embrace the Blu-Ray format in Japan.

Adult movie makers said at the Adult Treasure Expo 2007 over the weekend that Sony is now indirectly offering them technical support. Although the company will not press Blu-Ray DVDs for porn makers, they have found a company in Taiwan that will. Sony is now offering technical support to any company that wishes to manufacture Blu-Ray discs, regardless of the content it wants to offer.

"In Japan, there are some problems. Companies cannot press Blu-ray discs because they cannot touch adult-related contracts," said the director of administration at Assist Corp, a Japanese company that authors and replicates DVDs for the porn industry in Japan, Kiyotaka Konno. "So we asked some makers in Taiwan to do the work, and then we import the discs back to Japan. The Taiwanese company was able to obtain a pressing machine from Sony and will start mass production in August."

There are currently ten porn films available on Blu-Ray in Japan, including JK, Sex Vacation in Guam and Eroist. According to Yoshimasa Nozu, a producer at Total Media Agency, however, that's about to change. His company plans to release one film a month on the format for the rest of the year. That compares to only one porn film currently available on HD-DVD.

The move will give Blu-Ray, and by extension the PS3, a leg up in the format wars. The adoption of VHS by the porn industry played a key role in that format winning out over Betamax in the '70s.

In the US HD-DVD has become the American porn industry's format of choice, thanks largely to Sony's reluctance to allow smut onto its machines.

^{Source: PC World}