Cape Town and Joburg’s porn “industries” have been gutted by piracy and the boom of online content. Over the past decade, sales of DVDs have dropped by as much as 90 percent, distributors say.

And while there is a huge demand for local content, nobody wants to take the risk of bankrolling expensive films that will only have a few thousand sales because most of the buyers are picking up pirate copies.

The future does not lie with an industry anymore, it’s with thousands of people shooting their own content at home and uploading it to the net, say experts.

It’s a harsh reality for Cape Town, and the rest of the country, which was on the cusp of breaking through in 2011.

At the time, film-makers were quoted saying the local porn industry was generating as much as R300-million a year.

One of these directors was Tau Morena who told the Cape Argus that while porn was still a lucrative investment, the focus had changed.

“I have 1 000 actors, actresses and models who are willing to participate,” he said. “But the challenge is we haven’t found an innovative way to bring the product to market in a sustainable way so that everyone involved can make a decent income.”

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