HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Huccio.com's offering of downloadable 4K Ultra HD erotic content begins Sunday.
Huccio, led by founder Tony Tsai, is offering $24.99 monthly subscriptions and pay-per-view options for the 4K Ultra HD downloads.
The format has lots of promises for the adult entertainment business because 4K Ultra HD offers four times the resolution of 1080p HDTV — twice as many pixels in each direction, horizontally and vertically.
Huccio currently is the only adult website to include 4K Ultra HD movies for paying customers, but at least one other adult company is already preparing to follow suit.
Pink Visual, which was one of the first companies to produce a porn site geared for the iPad and content streamed from the cloud, is considering the format.
"If [users] can get 4K on YouTube, they should definitely get it in porn," Pink Visual's Lela Chavis from Pink Visual told the Verge. "We’d rather try it and see how it goes rather than ignore it and miss out on such a fun opportunity."
"There are countless people across the world who will pay for top-notch quality porn. Obviously it’s something that they don’t go around talking about, but nonetheless, people are out there who want great quality."
Tsai of Huccio told XBIZ that that contention is correct.
"[We are] not only pushing the 4K platform, but part of our focus is to produce content with an emphasis on great cinematography," he said. "We want to bridge the cinematic feel with erotic content. 4K is just the next format so at the end of the day the quality of the content itself is key."
But other studios are taking a wait-and-see approach to see how the format shakes out.
"I won’t switch this up unless I absolutely have to," Joanna Angel, the director, performer and studio owner, told the Verge.
Angel rekindled memories of the late 2000s when companies like Vivid and Digital Playground started shooting in HD.
"Eventually I bit the bullet and got our first HD camera, but I really saw no difference in the quality. In fact, I thought it got a little worse," she said. "We had to light things differently, girls had to do their makeup differently, and it took some time before we got it right."
That wait-and-see approach is what many industry execs are thinking about. So far, industry officials in the XBIZ.net community are still wary of the future performance of the format.
According to an online poll, 40 percent of XBIZ.net respondents felt that the technology was unlikely to have much impact on the business, with 18 percent holding out hope that 4K would revitalize the business. Thirty-six percent replied it was too still early to tell.
