If there has been a better headline today than "Steve Jobs Recommends Android For Fans of Porn", I have not yet seen it.

10 years ago
"A journalist asked whether Apple would consider allowing customers to load apps through means other than the App Store, and Jobs again noted Android as an option for porn fans."
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17 Responses:

  1. pavel_lishin says:
    10 years ago at 11:34 am

    I've always heard that BetaMax failed because they refused to allow pornography to be stored on their tapes; is this an actual urban legend, or is Apple just cramming fingers in its ears?

    (Captcha: Softwood Mr. Heh.)
    • pvck says:
      10 years ago at 12:19 pm

      I believe your story is a bit conflated. VHS succeeded because the porn industry wholeheartedly embraced it, but that was not due to a moral stance afaik.
      • hadlock says:
        10 years ago at 12:32 pm

        conflated

        Ah, I knew there was a word whose definition was "check snopes.com"
      • captain18 says:
        10 years ago at 7:29 pm

        My understanding of the story involves a compounding of factors:

      • Because Sony had a really good idea of how much money was to be made from the home video market (after seeing the industrial success of the joint U-Matic format), they made sure that they held all the Betamax patents and hoped to hold the market captive based on their reputation.
      • Because JVC (and its parent, Matsushita/Panasonic) wanted to take on Sony, they were willing to license their VHS technology for less which led to increased marketplace competition in the form of more vendors selling VHS-compatible equipment.
      • As a result, the entire production chain for VHS (cameras, tape stock, duplicators, etc.) was significantly cheaper and therefore attractive to the low-budget video segment which automatically could not afford to release on multiple formats.
      • This also meant that VHS decks were initially less expensive for the video store to buy, and therefore less expensive for customers to rent (to expose the customer to the format) and later to buy (to expand market penetration).
      • Since these consumers already had a VHS deck, they of course would continue to rent other titles as VHS and to buy VHS tape stock.

        Certainly there are other factors that were in play -- the idea of recording an entire football game on one tape, etc. And the overall affordability of VHS and the proactive efforts of the VHS consortium to do market research and saturate the market should not be overlooked. And given the choice Sony would probably have preferred the moral high ground at not being the smut-peddler's choice.

        Ultimately though I've heard from several places that the early Betamax duplicators especially were much more expensive than for VHS. I would like very much to get my hands on price lists for such gear around, say, 1978-1980 and see if that bears out.