Soft On Demand
The AV Open awards for Japanese adult video (AV) companies were conceived as a means to improve public relations and provide a measure of quality for adult videos on a par with the AVN Awards for the US porn industry. It was the result of a collaboration between Tokyo Sports, a leading Japanese tabloid paper, and the large Japanese porn conglomerate Soft On Demand (SOD). Adult video production companies were invited to enter a candidate video in the contest and the video with the most number of sales during a set period would be the winner. The first prize award was 10 million yen (about $100,000), the second-place finisher took 5 million yen (about $50,000) and third place was worth 3 million yen (about $30,000). Videos in the contest were specially marked as AV Open entries and could be bought from the official site or at stores throughout Japan. Each contestant was to be given the same amount of space in the store displays.