Startup Idea: Save and Sell Porn History
Jun. 11th, 2015 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThe other day, I stumbled upon Extrapolated Art, which uses machine learning to assess the contents of an image and extrapolate out from there what the image would be like if the canvas had been bigger. The results are often convincing, although sometimes not so much.
This reminds me greatly of Scene Completion using millions of photographs, which purports to "fix" damaged images by analyzing millions of similar photographs, finding one that would fit into the damaged portion of the image, color-matching the image within a given range, and producing a new image.
Why can't we do this with movie frames?
So, my startup idea is simple: Many guys who were college age in the 80s have a strong nostalgia for the porn of that era, most of which is utterly inaccessible due to the loss of original, the utterly crap quality of VHS formats and the slow degradation of VHS tape.
So use the algorithms available to fix it all. Various detection algorithms could identify "damage" in any given frame (including black-box and pixelation censorship). There is a library of zillions of hours of High Definition porn out there. Porn films don't typically have that many scenes and don't typically move the cameras around much; a human would have to vouch for just the very first frame of any given scene, and may have to do some tuning, and then the algorithm would "repair" the movie using each previous frame as a weighted source of quality, turning all those old "classics" into modern, HD versions with balanced colors and crystal clear genitals.
So, all I need is four million dollars, and a couple of other programmers to help me stitch this thing together, and maybe we could tolerate a manager of some kind, and we'll rake in billions, people, billions!.
This reminds me greatly of Scene Completion using millions of photographs, which purports to "fix" damaged images by analyzing millions of similar photographs, finding one that would fit into the damaged portion of the image, color-matching the image within a given range, and producing a new image.
Why can't we do this with movie frames?
So, my startup idea is simple: Many guys who were college age in the 80s have a strong nostalgia for the porn of that era, most of which is utterly inaccessible due to the loss of original, the utterly crap quality of VHS formats and the slow degradation of VHS tape.
So use the algorithms available to fix it all. Various detection algorithms could identify "damage" in any given frame (including black-box and pixelation censorship). There is a library of zillions of hours of High Definition porn out there. Porn films don't typically have that many scenes and don't typically move the cameras around much; a human would have to vouch for just the very first frame of any given scene, and may have to do some tuning, and then the algorithm would "repair" the movie using each previous frame as a weighted source of quality, turning all those old "classics" into modern, HD versions with balanced colors and crystal clear genitals.
So, all I need is four million dollars, and a couple of other programmers to help me stitch this thing together, and maybe we could tolerate a manager of some kind, and we'll rake in billions, people, billions!.
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Date: 2015-06-11 10:32 pm (UTC)I think a VC would want some quantifiable numbers on the statement "Many guys who were college age in the 80s have a strong nostalgia for the porn of that era" which would be rather a fun survey to run, but sadly I suspect with the sheer abundance of free porn,porn,porn on the Internet, I don't know if there's much of a market for a product that isn't that substantively different from what one can find easily online today.
Unless there's a middle-aged millionaire or two out there missing their classic porn. Stranger things have definitely happened...