Why Adult DVDs?
In these days of streaming everything and free porn at the click of a mouse…it’s a reasonable question. The truth? If you’d asked me in 2009 in the midst of the economic crash if I thought we’d still be selling adult DVDs in 2021, I’d have said probably not. At the time we were still wholesaling to stores around the country (and in a few foreign countries) and movie rental stores were dropping faster than Joe Biden in a stiff wind. And yet, here we are in 2021 and while prices are down a little, porn DVD sales remain strong. I began to wonder why this segment of the home entertainment market has stubbornly refused to abandon this last physical format for movies.
Up until about 2017, most large tube sites – Pornhub included, did not use encryption on their platforms. If you look at the address bar of this website, you’ll see a little padlock icon to the left – this means the site is ‘served’ through SSL data encryption and much more difficult to hack into. Having said that, it is foolish to think encryption makes getting into a site ‘impossible’. A couple weeks ago it was discovered that hackers were able to breach the highly touted “unhackable” block chain technology and make off with over 600 million in digital currency tokens. The clever thieves were unable to convert the booty to usable cash and began returning it within days. The whole exercise may have been a stunt or perhaps a job application (Successful hackers usually land lucrative jobs with governments and banks…after they get out of prison) but the point had been made. An old friend of mine once dropped this pearl of wisdom as I was struggling with a bathroom demolition: “If a person built it, another person can take it apart.” In internet terms, the harder a thing IS to take apart, the more secure it is.
Porn is infamous for innovating new internet technologies (online credit card processing, subscription billing models, and live streaming to name a few) but they were very late to the game on website security. That’s right…all that nasty surfing we did up until 2017 was easily available to every mediocre amateur computer whiz in the world. That data is still sitting on literally thousands of computers around the globe. Porn fans perhaps not surprisingly, didn’t seem to care. But with the rise of big tech and social media sites and the knowledge that every keystroke we enter on them is recorded, collated, matched to a profile, filed and used to sell us stuff based on those keystrokes…attitudes began to change. Enter duckduckgo and later VPN – Virtual Private Networks where you can search, locate, and surf naughty websites in relative privacy…for now.
Americans have always placed a high value on their privacy and independence and we get frisky when it appears a company or worse, a government is paying too much attention to our lives – particularly our sex lives. Most of the big streaming porn sites are secure now, but they are also tracking every IP address and keystroke just like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, and using that information to sell you more porn. They may be trading or selling it as well.
Privacy and a reluctance to play into the greedy hands of global porn corporations is high on the list of why adult DVDs have not just survived, but continue to thrive. Retailers of physical goods generally do not ‘remarket’ items to customers based on past purchases – a staple of online streaming services. We follow market trends, but not necessarily individual customers. Aside from the occasional mailing list, (we have one) ethical online physical retailers do not collect data on you and sell it to other companies, or even use it to sell you more porn. Other than the online purchase itself, there is no way to track a customer’s usage of the product and ‘monetize’ that data. XXX DVDs have emerged as the most private way to watch porn on the planet.
Other more obvious considerations I’ve heard is better video/sound quality (unless you fork over subscription fees to access the 4K content on porn sites), the ability to start stop and return to precise places in the movie, the ability to watch porn on any TV or computer with a player, and of course – with a DVD, you don’t just get one clip…you get the whole enchilada…with sauce! DVDs have an extremely low defective rate and you don’t need an internet connection to watch them…bonus.
With the recent revelations of abuse and potential sex trafficking being associated with some high profile tube sites, more and more porn customers are questioning how much of their data and browsing history they want stored on the servers of these companies if the hammer ever comes down. DVDs present a relatively private alternative to the intrusive data-mining models of online streaming sites. For this reason alone, I don’t see DVDs going away any time soon.
JB