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Lookin' for adventure! Whether bi- or straight or gay! ...

Porn to be wi-i-i-ild...

Ah yes. Porn. Or, as The Times house style would doubtless prefer I label it, "adult entertainment". A friend to the lonely, a fillip to the listless, a scourge to the prissy. It is porn that has, time and time again, decided the ultimate fate of so many new technologies. If video did indeed kill the radio star, as the Buggles so painstakingly asserted, it was because video got in so quickly and created the porno star.

The internet, supposedly construed to help MIT professors chat with astronomers in Australia, or to let us keep emailing each other in the event of nuclear war, became the force it now is because of porn. Millions and millions of clicks in search of porn. The famous Google algorithm makes everyone's life immeasurably easier, but its greatest power (let's face it) is the ability to pin-point precisely the perversion a given searcher is after.

And now, once again, the porn industry will wield its mighty sword and make its Solomon-esque decision in the battle of the DVD formats. It's HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray in a no-holds barred (or censored) fight to the death. The early signs were good for HD-DVD but it appears that the Japanese porno industry has staked its not inconsiderable reputation on Blu-Ray - the super high-definition format, which, to quote a senior Sony executive, "allows you to see every hair".

Sony, of course, occupies far too high a moral high ground to sully itself with smut. It will not hand out Blu-Ray licenses to stamp Blu-Ray discs to adult entertainment studios, but is, off the record, perfectly happy for the other 100 members of the Blu-Ray consortium to do so. And, believe me, they have. This side of the story is generally played down in the business school lectures, but Betamax was slaughtered, in large part, because porno went VHS.

Sony, whose chief exec knows a thing or two about media markets, has not changed its overall policy but is quietly making it easier for the adult entertainment industry to plump for Blu-Ray. Plus, there are nearly 5 million PS3s in homes across the world. If the Wii is for families, the PS3 is for serious gamers. And if I know serious gamers, they are serious about all manner of entertainment.

In the US, the $57 billion porno industry has yet to fully make up its mind, but is, according to industry analysts heading towards Blu-Ray. Porn studio Digital Playground, the largest of the high-def pornographers has come out in favour of the Sony format, while others are dragging their feet a little and citing the cheaper economics of the Toshiba format.

But Japan, bless its smut-mongering cotton socks (and latex g-strings) has been much more decisive about its preferred format for filth. There are 10 Blu-Ray Japanese porno titles out at the moment (vs just one on HD-DVD), and the selection is set to swell.

This is it. This is the call. Porn to lead Blu-Ray to outright victory in the format wars by 3Q '08.