When Bob Crane, the star of  the hit sitcom of the 1960’s,  “Hogan’s Heroes,” was found murdered in an Arizona motel in the late 1970’s, among his personal effects were several hundred pounds of video equipment.  Crane had state-of-the-art equipment for 1974: a huge video camera, a heavy playback tape machine (roughly the size of four microwave ovens stacked together), and enough lights to form a small production company.

(Can we take a moment, just to reflect on the weirdness of a TV show set in a Nazi prison POW camp?  And, by the way, it was a big hit at the time -- it lasted 6 seasons -- which was barely 20 years after the war.  Now, of course, it's unthinkable.  But aren't we supposed to get less sensitive to stuff, over time?  Nazis, I guess, are the exception.)

Crane was a porn freak.  He didn’t just like to watch it; he especially liked to make his own.  But back then, being a porn freak wasn’t for the casual hobbyist.  The sheer weight and bulk of the equipment required – the camera and the playback machines and the giant editing deck – required a certain dedication, a deep commitment to the enterprise.  The airline overweight luggage charges alone were suitable barriers to entry, and the enormous cost of what was essentially professional television equipment managed to keep the riff-raff out.  Or in, depending.

All of that changed, of course, a few years later with the introduction of the VCR and a camcorder the size of a plump chicken.  Eventually, even those items were consolidated into a tiny notebook computer and a camera the size of a chicken sandwich.  Both of those two items are so small and compact that they would barely show up in crime-scene photographs.  Thirty years ago, poor Bob Crane had to schlep back-breaking crates all over the country to satisfy his creepy hobby; now it all fits conveniently in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of you.  Golfers have more luggage.

This wasn’t a coincidence.  New technology relies on “early adopters” to pay more for ground-breaking equipment.  Audiophiles subsidized the introduction of the compact disc with their single-minded pursuit of perfect sound reproduction.  Computer geeks brought us the BlackBerry and the iPhone.  Nerdy, dateless college tech-heads were driven by their real-world, three-dimensional loneliness to create virtual, two-dimensional social lives – presto: Facebook and MySpace.

And poor, dead Bob Crane gave us the VCR.  He lugged all that stuff so that we could slip in “Prince Caspian” and keep the kids quiet for a couple of hours.  From there it was a short high-tech hop to online, web-based video – which, as you’ll pretend not to know, was developed and perfected because enough citizens want to watch other citizens roll around naked together to make it worth the time and expense of figuring out a way for them to do just that, without leaving their home or their desk.

Pornography, then, is a bellweather.  Pornography is a trailblazer.  People in search of dirty pictures created a market for new technology, which people in search of less dicey things – like videos of cats, people using pretend light sabres, my funny family, whatever -- follow, a year or two later.  So if the pornography business is always a few steps ahead of the rest of the entertainment industry – in distribution and business model – why not check in with it and see what’s up?  

What’s up are online revenues, to almost 3 billion dollars.  What’s down are DVD sales, by at least 15 percent.  What’s up are individual, ad-hoc sites, which have taken business and market share away from the older, bigger brands.   What’s down are production costs, a consequence of the fragmented, tighter margin business.  In other words, what’s going on in the pornography business is what’s going to be going on in the rest of the entertainment industry in two years: costs pushed down; online distribution; individual brands eclipsing studio brands, the slow collapse of the big players as the smaller, more nimble players rise.  Pornography has always been a niche business, if you’ll forgive the pun.  Now, Hollywood is following suit.

All over town, studios are slashing film budgets and production deals.  The major film studios are concentrating resources on a few large releases – called “tentpoles” – and spreading the rest of the money around on a lot of smaller, independent, micro-scale pictures.  And in television, as the audience for the big broadcast networks plummets, it scatters across a 600-channel dial, each channel tailored to a more specific, more particular taste.  And of course it’s all ending up on the web, just like the dirty pictures did a few years ago.

If you’re a writer, this can be a very exciting time.  The country club era of fat studio deals is over, but the exploding diversified entertainment market – the web, the 600 channels of content, the indie film market – mean a lot more places to sell your wares, and a lot more entrepreneurial opportunities to take advantage of.

So if you want to see the future of the entertainment business?  Just take a look at our financially flexible, technologically innovative tacky second cousin.

As a writer, there is one development, though, that bothers me.  Pornography isn’t really what we might call “writer driven.”  People don’t pop in a porn DVD and say, “you know, I really loved that dialogue. Crisp.  Subtle.”  Billions of dollars aren’t being made on the web, streaming videos of naked people doing naked things,  because of the brilliant storytelling craft of, say, Night Nurses on Holiday.  So let’s hope that among the many developments in the future, no one figures out a way to do it without writers.    I know that Bob Crane, who made all of his money in the sit-com business, would agree with me.