Many say the last home video format war between VHS & Betamax was won by the former simply because the porn industry adopted the format.

Whilst the adult industry does a lot of its distribution online now, there's still a massive market out there for pornography on DVD - disc sales and rentals in 2005 were an estimated $4.28 billion.

The claims at CES last week of Blu-ray winning the format war is looking even more preamture this weekend thanks to a critical defection.

At the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo last week in Vegas, the very popular and influential Digital Playground declared that the company would from next week on be publishing movies only on HD DVD on a regular basis.

The move marks a complete turnaround from last year when the company publically backed the Blu-ray format. Why the change of heart? Well here's were the story gets interesting.

There Joone, founder of the company, told Heise.De that he had wanted to publish his movies on Blu-ray Disc, but "all Blu-ray Disc copying facilities in the United States had refused to cooperate".

In fact, the companies had "unanimously declared that Sony had threatened to withdraw their Blu-ray licenses should they stoop to making HD copies of pornographic films".

As a consequence Digital Playground now intends to release HD-DVD products at a rapid rate, including flagship title "Pirates" which was recently awarded as the most commercially successful porn DVD of 2006.