Re: "a clever idea that could change the porn industry"
I think a lot of consumers of porn are interested in short clips (5-10 min) of consistently high quality. This is a niche that isn't well served yet. YouPorn and the like is a grab-bag of short clips -- You can rummage around and find good content, but isn't a place where you can just go, press a button, and know you'll get something with good content, tailored to your tastes, with high quality sound and video, instantly the first time. An application that presented tailored "channels" as a TiVo-like application would stand to make a lot of money.
Studios and other porn content producers would like this if it could guarantee them a payment for their content, provide data on the viewing habits of users, and add user interfaces so that a consumer could click a button to buy a DVD or other product.
I don't think people will pay for it though. Streaming high quailty content requires both good source material and a lot of infrastructure - none of which are cheap.
Note that I said that the functionality was "Tivo-Like." No streaming is necessary!
You have content organized in "channels." You start out with very small resolution and short streaming "previews." But once you subscribe to a "channel" the application starts downloading longer Bittorrent "episodes" from torrents that are posted to an RSS feed. So there is an initial period when people only have access to "previews," but after the first night, it really is like a Tivo for short high-quality porn clips.
With Bittorrent, much of the bandwidth is provided by the P2P cloud. The bandwidth costs are for initial seeding and for the shorter, smaller "previews."
So really, the two keys to this idea are:
1) Packaging - the easy place to find high quality clips
2) The users bring their own bandwidth
I know that when I watch a porn DVD, what I'm really doing is going to my favorite one or two clips in the chapters menu. It's like in the old days when you had to buy the whole CD just to get the 1 or 2 tracks you really loved. I suspect that the market for really good, really short clips can come into being. Once one site shows that money can be made this way, then a lot of the high-quality free short clips will shift their availability to such pay channels, just like the shift from Napster to iTunes.
Yes, I am a coder. And yes, I've been thinking about issues surrounding the delivery of content since before YouTube. And I am considering quitting my job and living off savings to do personal projects.
I think a lot of consumers of porn are interested in short clips (5-10 min) of consistently high quality. This is a niche that isn't well served yet. YouPorn and the like is a grab-bag of short clips -- You can rummage around and find good content, but isn't a place where you can just go, press a button, and know you'll get something with good content, tailored to your tastes, with high quality sound and video, instantly the first time. An application that presented tailored "channels" as a TiVo-like application would stand to make a lot of money.
Studios and other porn content producers would like this if it could guarantee them a payment for their content, provide data on the viewing habits of users, and add user interfaces so that a consumer could click a button to buy a DVD or other product.