I was going to write a post about how similar the porn industry is to that of web video. The commonalities are striking. Find a hot girl with hopefully a big personality and put her as the focus of the show. Find the least expensive video equipment you can and using low cost production methods, quickly release as many videos as possible. Every now and then a hit pops out, but the key is volume. In the porn biz, its pay per view/subscription, for the internet video business its free with ads or maybe some money from Itunes. Not so different, are they ?
But thats not for this post. It occurred to me that its possible to find porn. Its possible to find PG 13 type videos,but its really difficult to find R rated videos. Sure there are Playboy or Mr SKin type sites that will titillate us, and there are the sites where college kids go wild, but thats not what Im referring to. Where are the internet videos that cover grown up subject matters, where nudity “that contributes to the subject matter” isn’t considered gratuitous or pornographic ?
You cant post that kind of material on Youtube , Myspace, Yahoo or AOL Video. So where will user generated content geared towards a more “mature” audience go ? Dailymotion ? Or does internet hosted video never get past PG – 13 ? Has internet hosted video evolved into the most censored medium of our generation ? If you really want to go beyond PG 13, do you have to host it yourself on your own website ?
@import url(http://www.google.com/cse/api/branding.css);
Mark,
Everyone’s afraid. Everyone’s playing it safe. It’s the future: No
lawsuits, no R-rated content, bailout’s for all!!
You can’t be mainstream and have R-rated content unless you’re in
theaters, then even xxx-rated Tarantino flicks like Hostel 2 are only rated R.
R just means “Reverything not Disney”.
And it’s only getting worse, political speech is getting censored now too on
sites like YouTube. Even the already poor conspiracy theorists are
getting driven off YouTube by YouTube or, rather, “displaced” by conglomeratized media.
Red Bull users with Patron ads now ask the independent video creator, “What are you doing here? This isn’t YOUtube anymore, it’s MYtube!” TivoTube. IndoctrinationTube, PatronTube, whatever you want to call it.
Bottom line, No R-rated content on our alcohol ads targetting 16-year-olds is allowed.
There really is no non-Patron-content safe from safe content restrictions on the internet unless of course you visit the recently launched and censorship-free BetterStream.com.
That site also answers this question you posed in your blog:
“Where are the internet videos that cover grown up subject matters, where nudity “that contributes to the subject matter” isn’t considered gratuitous or pornographic?”
The only thing we don’t allow right now is straight porn, but that’s more because we don’t want it to dominate art here. Not because of a parental reason. Parentals could be satisfied a lot easier on an almost-all porn site with good parental controls than on the open internet without.
Ben Ligeri
Anytime you wanna talk about the future, I’d love to hear from you.
p.s. To YouTube’s credit, they do leave some adult content up, unless it’s
part of a greater work, then they always take it down 🙂
Comment by Ben Ligeri -
Interesting observation but it\’s not at all about censorship, because there\’s tons of sites like fantasti.cc & youporn. The fact is, PG-13 and R are outdated constructs. Sans censorship, there\’s simply no market for PG-13 or R material… Playboy is for the articles, remember.
Comment by Jeff -
I would say the US mainstream television media is more censored than anything… follow that up by radio and print.
Comment by Rick -