Technology has more or less flowed with the proliferation of porn. VHS (over Betamax), bluray (over HD-DVD), online payments and other Internet features rose to prominence because pornographic content helped spearhead their adoption.
I could’ve sworn HD-DVD had more porn studios backing it. But it was also the time when professional commercial porn was dying as a business.
I will die on the hill that blu-ray won over HD-DVD purely because the PS3 could play blu-ray and the Xbox 360 couldn’t play either. Blu-ray players were crazy expensive when the PS3 came out, to the point that the PS3 was the cheapest blu-ray player when it came out.
Probably helped, but it definitely got accepted at a quicker rate because of porn.
Porn industries only chose blu-ray once it was already in the PS3. Out of all the HD-DVD players and blu-ray players on the planet combined at the end of the format war 10 out of 11 were PS3s. Also not to mention that almost everyone backed blu-ray and it was the objectively better format. It held 40% more information and was backed by the biggest media companies. On top of the fact blockbuster went blu-ray.
Honestly it’s very tiresome that everyone says that porn did it when you can look at the facts and see that the war was won by blu-ray from the start and that most porn content was available on both formats for a long time, basically guaranteeing that it couldn’t have affected the outcome. Like I get that “haha porn funny” but it clearly wasn’t the deciding factor, and arguably not a factor at all. Like any cursory look into the history dispels the myth immediately which makes me wonder why everyone feels the need to parrot it as if it’s fact.