CHARLOTTE, NC – The Pay Per View market is considered by many to be the largest growing segment of the online entertainment industry. So it made sense that the Pay Per View content Primer was among the panels featured at this year’s Phoenix Forum, one of the most popular mid-sized gatherings for webmasters in the Adult Industry. Moderated by CCBill’s Laurie Biviano, the panel included Stephen Bugbee of GigaCash, Randall Crockett of DRM Networks, Mike Hawk of Smashbucks, Mike Herman from AEBN, Christopher Levy of BuyDRM, as well as James Siebert from HotMovies who all weighed in on topics pertinent to the Pay Per View market.
Discussing the future of the Pay Per View industry, AEBN’s Mike Herman named consolidation and convergence as watchwords for the future. On the topic of convergence, he pointed to developing technology that is broadening the reach of the PPV. IPTV and Mobile are two of these new markets for Video-on-Demand and some companies are already ahead of the game. AEBN, for example, has already established its mobile brand – Xobile – and is in the process of integrating their mobile product in with its existing theater destination.
As the discussion evolved, the panel addressed the issues involved in starting a new VOD site, explaining that it is an expensive and labor-intensive proposition. One of the major barriers is the original cost of starting up. The cost of storage is high and the storage needs can be deceptive. In order to be viable in the market, the site would need movies encoded in several different formats as well as several different bit rates. For someone to try to emulate AEBN’s impressive diversity of formats and bit rates, one DVD would need to have six DVDs’ worth of storage. When storage can cost around $1 per gigabyte, and a site like AEBN has nearly one-half petabyte of storage for its movie library, that cost alone can be the cost that bankrupts a start-up company.
On top of storage space, there are many other issues a VOD site must address and most of those need money to be satisfactorily resolved. Members of the panel mentioned translations of movies, functionality, programming, and 24-hour customer service as necessary components for a site that must be in place before a site can even begin to make money. A rough estimate might put the original overhead cost of making one DVD live – available to paying customers – $100, all before it has made a cent. At the competitive VOD pricing, it would take a great deal of sold minutes before a site would begin to make profit off its movies.
Visit AEBN today and enjoy a place where quality VOD is finally easy to use. With no membership fees or recurring billing, you get exactly what you pay for every time. Paradise is only a click away and it’s at a great place called AEBN.
Visit www.aebn.com for everything you could ever imagine in adult movie entertainment.
The adult Video on Demand market was created by AEBN technology and development. Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, AEBN, is the industry leader with a market share in excess of 75 percent. AEBN.net ranks in the Top 200 most visited Websites on the Internet. AEBN maintains secured distribution rights to over 50,000 full-length adult titles, preserves strategic relationships with more than 1,000 movie studios and video producers, and markets to worldwide network of more than 20,000 Webmasters.
For more information about AEBN, any of its products or to inquire about becoming an AEBN webmaster affiliate, visit www.aebn.net, e-mail: [email protected] or call (800) 628-0241.