When you go out to an adult retail store and buy a DVD for $29.95, you’ve chosen to pay per video: porn is really expensive if you break it down this purchasing model, and I think if you take a moment to consider your other options, you’ll agree that the Internet has grown to a point where it has overcome any advantages previously afforded only to the DVD watching experience.
It used to be that online porn took minutes, if not hours, to completely download a standard 120 minute adult movie. While subscription sites offered ‘unlimited access to thousands of adult titles’, unfortunately, download speeds made getting even your $40 worth of porn a laborious and often disappointing experience. Unless you downloaded a whole bunch of movies ahead of time without screening them, DVDs were the only real choice for quickly skimming through high volumes of quality porn until you found the scene that turned you on; and then you had total control over playback speed, zoom in/out, and other user controls. Of course, a DVD is no longer fresh after you’ve watched it the first time, but still: back then, I can see how it made sense to pay per video.
Porn has come a long way since then, and so has the technology behind the Internet, so that now high-quality adult movies can be seamlessly streamed in real time directly to your computer or even TV set. When you break down the price of a new adult feature film at $30 based on the pay per video; porn titles usually run 120 minutes, you’ll find that you’re actually paying $.25 a minute for porn- much of which is not even the juicy stuff you really came to watch. A quick division of the costs for pay per minute shows that at as little as $.08 per minute, you’re getting access to way more content, at over 1/3 of the price, and you don’t even have to gas up your car to go out and pick up a video.
