House of Cards, Breaking Bad, and porn. What do they all have in common? No, it’s not your late night viewing lineup. Rather, all of the above will soon be shown in dazzling Ultra HD resolution.
While the first two programs are being pioneered by the likes of Netflix and Sony respectively, the latter is coming most recently from the subscription porn service, Naughty America. The company will be one of the first ‘adult entertainment’ companies to shoot, produce, and air its content in 4K, or Ultra HD, which allows for four times the pixel resolution of 1080p HD content. As The Verge reports, Naughty America joins only one known rival company in its attempt to switch to the all too revealing format, the adult website Huccio.com.
If there’s one thing we learned about 4K at CES 2014, it’s that the tech industry at large is pushing hard to make content for the format a reality. Sony, LG, Samsung, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings all unveiled promising reports about the industry’s multi-faceted approach to combat the woeful lack of 4K content currently available, including new services for creating, downloading, and streaming 4K.
Still, though the industry may be making big strides that will get the ball rolling, shooting, editing, and storing 4K is still a pretty big task. House of Cards is one of the few productions to break into the game, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Naughty America will be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just to upgrade its equipment to be 4K-ready. It’s adding high-res cameras, powerful computers like Apple’s new Mac Pro with the editing capacity to work with the files, and space. Lots of space. Full length 4K movies take up terabytes of hard drive space in their native format. If the gamble doesn’t pay off, the small company could likely live or die by its decision.
For its efforts, Naughty America hopes to grow its fan base, and get the jump on others in the industry. The company charges $25/month for its current service, and will be adding a $10 surcharge per month for those who want to raise the bar (oh boy, we were in trouble from the start) to UHD. In the WSJ report, Naughty America’s CEO, Andreas Hronopoulos, gave plenty of reasons why porn is a good fit for UHD, not the least of which was blurring the line of reality for the company’s viewers.
Of course, all 4K content is designed to create a more realistic vision of the world in the box. But when the checkered adult entertainment industry gets in on the action, it takes the idea to a whole new level. One can’t help but remember a scene from the Big Lebowski, in which Jackie Treehorn is describing the new era of “interactive erotic software,” to which the Dude replies … well, watch the movie if you don’t remember. For now, we’ll take Treehorn’s word that the brain is still ” … the greatest erogenous zone.”
