Claim: Sony Re-Bans Porn on Blu-Ray.
Every month, like clockwork, a story appears on some wire or other seeking to explain medium adoption as a function of smut. Reuters is the last to claim that pornography "might," "may," "is considered to," "is thought to," or "has been said to" be the driving force behind sales, this time opting for "could be" as its weasel-word construction for this lunar cycle.
It’s quasi-sourced to a Forrester analyst, not actually quoted until the seventh paragraph, who offers a milquetoast "It would be the case if the porn industry wanted it to be…"-variant utterance. The story then claims that Sony has banned porn from Blu-Ray. This claim, last time I looked, turned out to be analyst-sourced rumor and was swiftly debunked. Has it been rebunked? Reuters hangs its hat on this alleged Sony Blu-Ray naughtiness ban later in the piece, talking of how HD-DVD might win because of it.
The anonymous story writer also claims, however, that VHS toppled Betamax in the mid 1970s, an error the copy editors neglected to couch with an "if" or, perhaps, a "might have been in a parallel universe where VHS wasn’t released until 1976 and didn’t crush Beta sales for nearly a decade."
