Demise of live production

[localroger]

There were actually several transitions, depending on which part of the business you focus on. The mainstream "golden age of porn" was well and truly over by 1982. Film grain does not make up for the lighting, wardrobe, locations, writing, extra nonsex scenes to knit a story together, and other Hollywood touches that are worthwhile when you're spending the bucks to rent 35mm cameras and buy the film for a full length production. But it's only worth doing that in the first place for mainstream stuff with the most general audiences, and once it was possible to use video instead of film the "video = cheap" folks gutted everything else.

In fetish, there had never been such lavish films; they used 35mm because that was the only technology, got nice image quality whether anyone wanted it or not, and skimped on everything else as much as necessary to get a (generally short single-scene) production paid for. Video made this cheaper too but did not affect it quite as dramatically. Fetish also had other distribution problems due to the forbidden content rules enforced by the distributors. This is why HOM never showed any form of sexual penetration or even mock-fantasy actual harm to their models.

This situation stayed stable until around 1997. Internet video still wasn't competitive with tape video but the internet itself allowed for content which could not be distributed any other way. For many consumers it was worth putting up with 240x320 video and VGA stills to get the results of this freedom. The internet also eliminated all the distribution infrastructure and middle men. This led to roughly 7 year reign of Insex and the ecosystem they created.

Of course, internet video quality gradually caught up and the mainstream producers moved to a similar model, and the Justice Department figured out how to put a thumb on the content they disliked most.

Regulating AI content is already a problem and one not likely to ever be solved with LLM technology. LLM's have no attention span so they are at their best with stills and short clips, but they still have trouble with real world details especially in any kind of unusual situation. As with post 1997 I expect a wave of clips that are mediocre technical quality (though not in traditional ways), with content that can't be made practically by other methods, that can't be made legally, or that there isn't much of an audience for. There may be a large market for single customer custom work.

Everything will as always be driven by cheapness so human participants will be frozen out except as volunteers or for specialist work. Humans will still be capable of dialog, longer interactions, better continuity, and there will probably be markets where they will be paid as necessary to produce works, possibly a lot of customs that are then generally distributed.

Of course I believe LLM's are a limited technology which is reaching a point of diminishing returns for more learning compute power and will soon reach a practical utility limit. If I'm wrong about that things might be quite different, but I'm probably not wrong LOL.

[bakerboy]

here were actually several transitions, depending on which part of the business you focus on. The mainstream "golden age of porn" was well and truly over by 1982. Film grain does not make up for the lighting, wardrobe, locations, writing, extra nonsex scenes to knit a story together, and other Hollywood touches that are worthwhile when you're spending the bucks to rent 35mm cameras and buy the film for a full length production. But it's only worth doing that in the first place for mainstream stuff with the most general audiences, and once it was possible to use video instead of film the "video = cheap" folks gutted everything else.

You missed my point ( or I did NOT make it clear enough). I was NOT referring to GIMP or porn, I was referring to mainstream feature film business I was involved with then.

Generally I agree with the rest of your comments

[localroger]

Oh thanks for the clarification bakerboy. I guess I never gave much thought to what the video transition would mean to actual Hollywood. Now that you mention it, it makes perfect sense.