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Streaming boom, stock at record high: Netflix is among the big winners in the Corona downtime. On the stock market, the online video service has even overtaken the Hollywood giant Disney. Can the latest quarterly figures justify the hype?

The Corona crisis is crippling the global economy and keeping the financial markets on tenterhooks. But while many US companies are closing down shops or factories and taking leave or laying off employees, the standstill is playing into the hands of others. Netflix is one such case – the online video service benefits like few other companies from the fact that many people around the world stay at home. In addition, the streaming market leader has recently landed a big viral hit with the documentary series “Tiger King”.

Founded in 1997 in Los Gatos, California, the group is on one of the biggest waves of success in its history. On the stock exchange, Netflix shares have already risen by over 36 percent this year – despite a general fall in prices – and have recently broken new records. With a stock market value of almost 195 billion dollars, even the US entertainment giant Walt Disney, which was worth twice as much as Netflix in the winter, was overtaken.

Netflix plans to present its results for the first quarter on Tuesday after the US stock exchange closes (22:00 CEST). The corona pandemic should ensure strong figures. Netflix is already the undisputed king of streaming: even before the virus spread, the service had 167 million subscribers and was already keeping people around the globe in their homes. From the beginning of January until the end of March, Netflix was committed to adding seven million more subscribers.

While the impact of the pandemic has only really hit most parts of the world – and the important U.S. domestic market – last month, the service has been able to gain a significant share of the market. Nevertheless, experts expect Netflix to easily exceed its growth targets. The “stay-at-home” era caused by the virus outbreak should ensure that Netflix further extends its lead in the streaming market, says Credit Suisse analyst Brian Russo. The competition is not yet global enough to benefit from the trend to the same extent.

Also read:
How you can watch Netflix abroad

It’s a sunny Wednesday here in Tokyo. The night was good. Kim Yong Un still hasn’t sent us a bomb, which we can be happy about every day. Today we go to Shibuya, to an old abandoned hospital. There the Tokyo Adult VR Show takes place and developers present their VR Experiences for adults. I am very excited.

I had sex in VR

The last time this show was, it was so crowded that the organizers had to cancel the event. This time, however, the address from the venue was only given to people who could purchase one of the coveted 500 tickets in advance online. All visitors were also divided into five groups, which should have access at different times.

I was there two hours before the official start with the local Japanese press. The abandoned hospital is a bit run down, but that gives the whole show a great backdrop. Armed with a press bracelet I now have five floors with VR experiences for adults in front of me.

The tension continues to rise

At first I landed in an operating theatre, which presented fetish VR stories. I get a gear VR put on and a lovely virtual young Japanese lady stretches her feet towards me. I fast-forward, but it always goes on like this. Sometimes with pantyhose and sometimes without. The resolution is fine but in the end it was just a small VR video produced by an established vr studio, which is a bit above the quality of the Samsung Gear VR. I can also buy the movies on DVD, but I leave that for now and look into the next rooms.

A company also showed a vest that simulates a woman standing on you. So in the truest sense of the word. During the demonstration I put on the vest and mobile VR glasses and afterwards a 360 degree video was played showing a woman beating me on the chest and in the stomach. The system already works very well, but for me it is rather no enrichment for my sex life.

Tokyo Adult VR Show

A few exhibitors further on, an adult movie company brought along a porn actress to perform a little show that I can watch with HTC Vive. She sits behind a cloth in front of a 180 degree camera and I see the picture in the Vive live and hear her whispering into my ear. We talk and I try to be charming with my broken Japanese. That’s really nice because it’s just a direct interaction. It’s certainly only a matter of time before many cam websites will switch to VR.

Find out more: https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/things-to-do/virtual-reality-in-tokyo

In the next room are two actresses from a well-known adult website in Japan called Man Zoku. You can watch the actresses’ movies with Gear VRs or other mobile VR headsets while the nice ladies crawl one’s back or play around with a massage stick.

So it goes on. Past realistic rubber breasts to the many developers who bring Japanese cartoon characters to life with their software. Usually all interactive VR experiences are knitted according to the following pattern:

1. Modify a character (similar to role-playing games)
2. Position the character and interact with it. (However, the interaction possibilities are relatively limited)
3. If you get bored, you can change the positions and conjure up a camera in the VR experience with which you can capture the best poses of the character as pictures.

But we should mention a company that offers software that receives position data from the smartphone and passes it on to the virtual character. Up and down goes quite well with this control and the software also gets position changes well on the line.

All in all the show is very interesting and it is clear that the horizontal entertainment will also take place in the virtual reality soon.

Originally, the Oculus and co-driven virtual reality technology should revolutionize the gaming world. But first, the fantasy fulfillment engine inspires the porn world. A field trial.

What were we all naive at the beginning of the virtual reality wave two years ago? In fact, everyone, including Oculus VR, the founders of the hype, firmly believed that, of course, it will be the gamers who make VR a breakthrough. Ego shooter, simulations – all totally great with a feeling of being in the middle.

Nope. It did not take long for even the most ardent VR advocates to realize that the common game concepts do not work in virtual reality, at least not with current input devices. A classic first person shooter with WASD control, such as Team Fortress 2 (one of the first titles with Oculus support), is something that only very few people with VR glasses can play for more than a few minutes – and then they feel sick. When the sense of balance says “I’m sitting at your desk,” but the other senses are convinced to run through a fortress with a machine gun, after the chaos in the brain, the hassle comes in the stomach. No matter how good the technology is.

The VR developer community has understood this pretty quickly – and started to build a completely new form of electronic entertainment instead of classic games: so-called experiences, which one does not actively “play”, but simply “experienced”. Among the most popular of these truly mesmerizing experiences are titles such as Titans of Space (hovering in space and gazing at planets) and Sightline – the Chair (virtual LSD trip). In the future, there will also be “real” games that benefit from VR; the incredibly immersive Elite Dangerous gives you a taste of what awaits us.

Erotic Phantasies Instead Of Games

What works well now is what fantasy fulfillment machines are predestined for: porn. In the dark corners of the Internet you can now find several programs in which you can mate computer-generated characters – most of them are uncomfortably young-looking manga cartoonists, but there are also titles with ripped computer program figures like Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite. Sites like http://www.psvrporn.com/ offer vr porn for specific headsets.

Technically, most of these homebrew titles are extremely brutally implemented: Somewhere lie, stand or sit around sexually receptive draped 3D figures that move genre-typical. Especially strange in this respect is the program Sex Room: In a small room there are four anime characters in different positions, who constantly perform coitus movements – no matter whether one approaches them or not. If you go too close, there are the notorious clipping errors from many 3D games and you can see the hollow polygon figures from the inside – rather horror than eroticism. While most of these sex simulators thrive in the underground, there are also first commercial animated graphics sex simulators with Oculus Rift support such as Playgirls from the Japanese company Illusions or the station district Second Life clone Red Light Center of the Canadian company Utherverse Digital.

The exploitation of erotic fantasies in virtual reality began much more playful and harmless: For example, the title Sleeping on Unity Chan’s Lap of the Japanese developer Up-frontier has a droll effect: A fully clothed anime character sits on a park bench (the eponymous Unity figure). Chan), on whose lap you can lie down – that’s it. Slightly irritating: In the PR video for the title, the creators demonstrate their program together with a replica of a woman’s lap made of polyester and padding; including thigh stumps.

The likewise Japanese title Dogelus 2 is just as pornographic, but tends more towards fetish. If you put on the VR glasses, you find yourself in a pretty cartoon world again. If you turn your head a bit, you will eventually see a female anime character approaching you – which is about the size of a skyscraper. The grand finale: The giant lady raises her foot and steps on the viewer.

How intensively the interaction with artificial figures in the virtual reality can be felt is shown by an even more harmless title: In Mikulus DK2, a cyborg half-human model modeled on the pop manga character Hatsune Miku simply stands in a completely black room. With the gamepad, you can approach the character – and although it is clearly an artificial, computer-designed being, you feel a discomfort, if you go too close: a real, strange people, you would never be so close to the Pelle move. And so you instinctively keep safe distance. Apparently, the illusion is so good that the brain wants to maintain the personal comfort zone in the virtual world.

Kissing Prohibited

Sure, it did not take long for Virtual Reality to arrive in the classic video porno industry – after all, animation-graphic sex outside of Japan is more of a niche topic. The leader in VR real movie porn – and probably one of the very few companies that already makes money with pure VR content – is the Spanish production company VirtualRealPorn. Founded in the fall of 2013 by software developers and photographers, the company sells filmed 180-degree spatial hardcore videos from a female and male first-person perspective. The content is not only prepared for Oculus VR goggles, but also for Samsung’s Gear VR headset and Google Cardboard’s narrow-track smartphone VR technology.

The technically well-made Virtual Real Porn videos create a strangely authentic mid-feel: Lower your head, you see his “own” porn actor body – irritating are not only the many tattoos, but also that depending on the selected video a different gender has. All this looks really real, but then again not – reverse phantom pain, so to speak. While in phantom pain you feel body parts that you can not see; you can see body parts in VR porn that you do not feel. VRP’s best movies for Gear VR are presented on GearVRporn.net.

The initially described physical comfort zone is also uncomfortable in Virtual RealPorn movies. At the latest when the protagonist inches away from your own face unasked whispered dirty talk chatter in the ear, you instinctively want to tear the glasses off your face – an effect that I could prove multiple times in field trials with various subjects.

While VR porn is slowly emerging on the radar of mainstream media, you can always hear the old truism of the new techniques that are only made successful by the porn industry: for example, VHS, CD-ROM and streaming video. Whether that also applies to Virtual Reality, has yet to show. Surely many people will have bought VR glasses with the prospect of lifelike pornography. But whether they become happy with it is another matter.

Do You Want That?

Just as classic game concepts can not be transferred to virtual reality, so does VR porn reception work differently than conventional ones. When viewing sexual content on paper, TV or computer screen, you assume a completely passive position: what you see is in no way connected to the here and now. Quite different with VR: Here you do not look from the outside, but from the inside – you are part of the scenery.

If a porn actor looks into the camera, you might feel like you’re meant to be part of conventional media, but you also know that there’s an unbridgeable barrier between me and the actor. If somebody looks me in the VR, the synapses say: “This is just a reality.”

This extreme increase in intensity and immersion changes the mode of porn consumption totally – and goes much more towards “real sex including emotional effort” than dull “sex watching”. Better VR technology will increase this contrast even more; The peripheral industry is also working on VR content-synchronized body extremities and vents – “Teledildonics” is the pretty term for it.

The VR Porn Pandora’s box will not close, so it’s probably only a matter of time until the columnists proclaim the post-sex era – and the moralists scourge cybersex and lament the reluctance to reproduce , Presumably, with the advancing quality of VR technology, there will actually be a few people who prefer pixels to meat. But that does not change anything in the deeply rooted yearning for human closeness. Virtual reality is an exciting destination; however, it will never be a place to live.