Civilisation peaks as 4K is embraced by the adult film industry

Clvilisation peaks

It was always going to happen. In fact it's surprising that it's taken so long!

The adult film industry has always tended to make the most of new technology. In the late '80s, sell-through video was all the rage as people realised that you could buy virtually whatever content you wanted on videotape. This was a long way from the instant downloads we have available now, but in the context of what had been available before, it was pretty amazing.

So suddenly being able to wander into a local shop and pick up a video of virtually anything (whether it was Back To The Future, or, you know, adult stuff)  was a complete revelation.

A whole industry sprung up not just duplicating the video tapes but also spooling the tape into empty cassette shells to make the tapes the same length as the material - to avoid wastage. These Tape Loaders were cantankerous machines at the best of times because they could wind a 90 minute tape in about 30 seconds, and if the tape (supplied on a massive "pancake" - a giant reel of the stuff) broke while it was spooling you could found yourself waist-high in videotape within seconds and having to untie the biggest knot in the universe.

The demand for videotape winding machines was such that not only did well known companies like Technicolor buy masses of them (for family-oriented material, we should stress in the context of this article) but also smaller operations who saw big a commercial opportunity. Ideally, you'd load tapes in a clean-room environment because a spec of dust looks like a granite boulder to a VCR playback head. But some operators ignored this, and it wasn't unusual to find a garden shed or an old garage crammed with thrumming videotape loaders.

More recently, the Adult Industry embraced the internet and is responsible for a very large proportion of its traffic today.

So it is with very little surprise whatsoever that we were informed this week that Naughty America, an American site catering for adult tastes (we're not going to publish the URL because we don't want to mislead the search engines...) announced that they're adopting 4K for their productions.

There's only one reason why we don't predict a stampede by all the other adult film companies to the new format: 4K is absolutely merciless when it comes to revealing the age of the person in front of the camera.