M+E Daily

It’s no secret that the adult entertainment industry has historically experimented with and adapted new video formats and interactive technologies early on, even helping to drive the popularity of some of them (see VHS).

Now, a growing number of adult entertainment companies are using virtual reality (VR) technology for their content, in response to consumer demand. At the same time, however, while several adult entertainment companies have started shooting their movies with 4K cameras, there appears to be at least some reluctance among them to hop on the Ultra High-Def (UHD) Blu-ray bandwagon so fast.

Vivid Entertainment, one of the adult entertainment industry’s market share leaders, is readying a virtual reality site, VividVirtual.com, according to Michael Klein, the company’s president of broadcasting and internet. “Right now we are in production of new VR content for the site as well as creating a VR feel to some of our existing content, starting with” the infamous Kim Kardashian sex tape, he said. “We hope to have the site up and running soon and we’ll be uploading new content on the site every month,” he said. Vivid’s current focus is on broadcasting, the internet and VR, he said, adding: “We’re always exploring other new technologies to see how they fit with the Vivid brand.” The VR site will be compatible with all VR devices, and users will be able to download or stream a version of the content that’s compatible with the specific device they have, he said.

On the 4K front, however, he said, “we haven’t made a decision yet” about UHD Blu-ray.

In early 2014, Vivid CEO Steven Hirsch said he was looking into shooting movies with 4K cameras and called Ultra HD “very real and exciting,” although he predicted it would take a while for significant 4K TV penetration in U.S. homes. At that time, Allison Vivas, president of rival Pink Visual, said she planned to wait and see how long it took for 4K to catch on before supporting it with content, pointing out it would add extra cost to making movies. That was before the UHD Blu-ray format was finalized. But adult entertainment companies, in general, haven’t seen a whole lot of demand for their movies on Blu-ray, in part because of the significant shift there’s been over the past few years to online.

Adult entertainment company Wasteland shot its first narrative storytelling film in 360 degrees in May, with a July release coming up, according to Colin Rowntree, Wasteland’s founder and director. The movie was directed by his wife, Angie Rowntree, and “she is taking a different immersive approach to VR than what most adult studios are doing,” he said.

Other studios are focusing on a first-person point of view, but she is instead concentrating on “dynamic storytelling,” in which viewers are not usually interacting with the main action or controlling the story in some way, but rather are free to explore the area all around them, according to Wasteland. The company’s VR films are short narrative dramas, with an average runtime of 20 minutes, split into several segments.

“At this point, it is too early to tell how much traction VR will have in the long run for adult entertainment,” said Colin Rowntree. The prior “next big thing” was 3D adult entertainment and “many studios invested millions in” that, only to later “lose their shirts as it turned out that most adult entertainment (and mainstream) consumers had little interest in it,” he said. That’s why Wasteland is avoiding POV film production that requires “some sort of strap-on device (pun intended), and opting to do 360-degree narrative storytelling which can also be viewed on a desktop, laptop or tablet device with no head gear needed,” he said.

Wastleand’s 360 VR works with the Google Chrome and Firefox browsers, he said. The studio’s developers are “hard at work figuring out how to” make its VR content compatible with Safari, and “our next roll-out will be targeted at Samsung Gear VR as this is the most popular” device platform to deploy on, he said. Wasteland also intends to achieve compatibility with the delayed Oculus Rift VR headset assuming that device ships, he said. After that, the goal will be to make the content available to iPhones and Android mobile devices for use with the cardboard VR viewers, but that “provides a major challenge for adult distributors as in order to do that, one needs an app on the Apple Store and Google Play to deploy the content,” he said.

Wasteland started shooting in 4K and, more recently, in 6K on RED cameras in 2015, he said. “Although there is currently little practical distribution possibilities for this in … UHD resolution, we saw this as a way to ‘future proof’ our company,” he said. The strategy will make it possible to deliver the company’s content both over the internet and on discs – whichever way consumers want it in the future, he said. “The other major benefit of filming at 4-6K is the cinematic quality of the footage is simply astounding, and allows us to use cinematic lenses and take full advantage of shallow depth of field, giving our films a ‘Hollywood’ feel,” he said.

He’s also concerned about facing the same sort of issues that the adult entertainment industry faced at the start of the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD battle, when it was initially difficult for them to get discs replicated in Blu-ray, he said. “My DVD distributor informs me that 4K disc replication and shipping will not be a viable option for at least the next two years to send to market,” he said.

Although there’s not a lot of extra cost involved in shooting VR, the same can’t be said for 4K, said Colin Rowntree. “VR is surprisingly similar in expense to shooting regular 2D HD films the way we are doing it as 360 degree narrative storytelling,” he said. “Each short scene is shot as a ‘single shot,’ meaning there are no camera cuts, multiple angles, etc. that happen in traditional filmmaking,” he pointed out. “It does take extra rehearsal time to be sure the actors can hit their marks and perform an entire scene without stopping, but when they get into the groove of it being like live theater as opposed to movie filming, it all balances out,” he said, adding post-production also requires “about the same amount of time and expense” as normal 2D HD movies. “The major chore in post-production of VR is ‘stitching’ the multiple cameras together, and the still mysterious process of color correction,” he said.

Wasteland’s current VR 360 camera setup includes the “modestly priced” Kodak 360 4K two-camera system and a binaural audio recording system, he said. That’s a “much better option for us than trying to rig together 16 GoPro cameras on a rubber mount, hoping they all stay shooting during a scene, and the countless hours of stitching the footage together” that’s involved with that, he said. “The downside of the Kodak system is that the documentation is far from helpful, the mobile monitoring app is very flawed, and we can only shoot for 10 minutes before [the cameras] auto shutdown due to overheating and battery drain,” he said.

When it comes to UHD shooting, the basic choices today are either using small digital single-lens reflex cameras that require stabilization rigs and carry an entry price combined of about $5,000, or using higher-end cameras such as the RED and Blackmagic cameras that capture “Hollywood level footage,” but require either stabilization, tracks, rails or dollies, and a focus pull system and focus puller camera assistant “to make sure everything stays in focus,” he said.

The latter also carries an entry price of at least $20,000, he said.

Initial VR headset market demand is strong and steadily growing, he said. Marketing campaigns by Samsung are “sure to drive VR headset use into the market fairly quickly now that content is being produced” for its Samsung Gear VR, he said, predicting the “bulk of users” for VR adult entertainment will be young males that are also into gaming.” YouTube is also getting a lot of VR 360 content “in front of their viewers,” he said.

Although the popular PornHub online portal is offering VR content, that “does not help adult producers out a lot as there is no way to monetize any content provided to them either by the producers, or the stolen content uploaded to them,” he said.

GameLink.com, meanwhile, plans to launch a VR adult entertainment aggregate site in July, said Jeff Dillon, VP of business development for eLine, a management company that serves as that aggregation site’s consultant. When it comes to new technology, “you always have to be ahead of the curve or you will be dead in the water five years from now,” he said, adding: “How people watch movies today is not how they will watch them a year from now.”

Customers have written to request VR content and that was “part of the driver for us getting into the market early,” he said.

The GameLink content will be compatible with all VR headsets from Oculus Rift to cardboard, and the company will even be “giving away VR viewers to help build the market and customer base,” he said. “One of the biggest challenges of VR is building the users base and getting devices in the hands of users,” he said, adding the company’s VR content will be priced the same as most of the movies on its site, which is $9.95. The one main difference is that the VR content will be much shorter, consisting of only one scene lasting about 15-30 minutes.

Once consumers “see how different and immersive this experience is they will be hooked,” he predicted, adding that he was initially “skeptical” about the technology, thinking it would be similar to 3D adult entertainment, with “lots of hype, but little demand.” But, he said, “as soon as I experienced VR firsthand I knew it would be huge.”

It may, however, take a while to build a significant library of VR adult entertainment titles. There are about 3,000 producers of 2D content on GameLink.com and 120,000 movies, said Dillon, adding he knew of only about 10 studios producing VR content now. But, “as the VR market grows, more and more producers will get into the VR game,” he predicted.

Another adult entertainment company that has entered the VR market is HoloFilm Productions, which launched the HoloGirlsVR.com site and ran a VR headset giveaway promotion. “We want to encourage fans’ interest in VR technology, which goes beyond simply watching adult entertainment, transporting viewers to an eye-popping 3D world,” CEO Brian Shuster said in a recent news release.

Online adult entertainment retailer Adult Empire also said it added VR content to its selection of movies for sale at AdultEmpire.com.

The content is compatible with head-mounted displays Google Cardboard, Gear VR, Oculus and the HTC Vive, and the site provides links and tutorials about each headset and its viewing capabilities.