Life on The EdgeXD

Okay, I’ll admit it: Having a video game arcade on a porn site may have been one of our more counter-intuitive moves. The prevailing wisdom for many years was that video games targeted the under-18 demographic, which would of course place it polar opposite the EdgeXD space. But we wanted to create an atmosphere in our online “Lounge” area that was fun and casual, with a culture that embraced but also extended beyond the high-tech pornography which is the site’s hallmark. That’s why we added the articles, and, specifically to this screed, the video arcade.

We’ve since learned that – according to a poll conducted by Ipsos MediaCT for game industry trade group the Entertainment Software Association – the median age for video game players is 35. Nice how that worked out. (We like to do the research after we spend thousands of dollars in implementation; it gives EdgeXD our patented patina of unpredictability, and our bizdev guys migraines.)

The games in the EdgeXD Arcade aren’t multi-player (yet), nor are they designed to be “immersive” beyond distracting you from the crappy cup of coffee you just picked up from the deli. They’re casual pursuits, time-wasters with a twist. And that twist is, of course, nakedness.

We’ve got some great stuff, most of which required some exceptional coordination amongst our video producers and game developers. “Spanktravision,” for example, amps up the jigsaw puzzles you enjoyed at your Daddy’s knee, replacing those static Monets and fruit baskets with moving sex videos. In a similar vein, our “Sex on the Brain” is an edgier version of the game “Concentration,” where instead of matching pictures of blue elephants and green crocodiles you need to remember which naked woman is hiding where. In fact, none of our games are particularly difficult in concept – it’s just that all the beautiful women in their birthday suits make for rather unfair distractions. How, for example, does anyone complete even an “easy” sudoku puzzle while Tera Patrick disrobes next to the grid? That’s the premise behind our “Sudoku Sluts Gone Wild.” And who better to play against in a topless version of tic tac toe then the incredible, unsinkable, Jamie Hammer? We even have our own online poker game going 24/7, starring Rachel Roxx as the clothes-challenged croupier. When the House provides both the chips AND the stripper, how can you go wrong?

Most elaborate is “Pimp Daddy Road Rage,” our post-GTA Galaga riff with a socially redeeming value in the low negative numbers. And we’ve got a first-person shooter, after a fashion, in the form of “Red Light Photo District.” In this game, subscribers get to play the role of a voyeur armed with a telephoto lens. Beats the hell out of playing a Space Marine with a BFG, and you never lose any life points.

None of these are likely to dethrone World of Warcraft in the Internet game arena anytime soon, but that’s not what we set out to accomplish. With the EdgeXD video arcade, we wanted to create a game room just around the way from the main bar and grill, a place where beer pong and nok hockey might provide a brief retreat from the serious business of skirt-chasing.

And as usual, we succeeded.

Grandmothers are not often viewed as technology’s early adopters or trend-setters. Yet if we all had been paying better attention to how our Nanas were using the ‘Net, and less to the Generation Y teens (or are we up to “Z” now? What happens when we run out of alphabet? Am I the only one who worries about that?), we would have caught the biggest online social trend since that Nigerian prince went on the lam with a suitcase full of Benjamins.

Sharing.

Give a grandma a computer, and the first thing she’ll usually do is ask how she can send pictures. (The first thing my Grandma did when we hooked her up was check the results of the third race at Belmont, but my family is not typical, I can never use them as a normal reference.) But generally speaking, grandmothers possess a fierce pride, and they want to share the objects of their pride with their family, friends, neighbors, strangers on the check-out line at Kohl’s – everyone really, it doesn’t make a difference. For the grandkid-less EdgeXD subscriber, it’s the pride he feels for the custom channels created from the videos he stores in his stash.

No one expects you to take your channels for a week-long sleepover in the summer, or keep copies of them in your wallet, but you are expected to share them with complete strangers. These are your video bookmarks compiled by you in special ways that are uniquely meaningful, clever, thematic, or just plain hot. And the ability to share your creations is one of the neatest aspects of EdgeXD membership. It’s like swapping mix tapes – or if that analogy is too analog for you, playlists on imeem.com.

At EdgeXd, we make it easy for our subscribers to create and share their own video playlists (“channels”). When you find a video that you like, or one that you think might go well as part of a larger “themed” offering, you can add it to your stash with one click of an on-screen button. From the stash, the you can create a name for and description of your channel and drag the videos into the playlist. That’s it! Channel created. So simple a child could do it. But since no children are allowed on the site, if you’re one of those guys who relies upon his eight-year-old to program the Tivo, perhaps you’d better pay attention.

The grandma part follows next: With a single click (are you beginning to sense a user interface design trend here?), the proud auteur can share his creation with the entire EdgeXd community of porn savants. It shows up in the search engine, can be rated by other members, and it’s popularity and merits tracked versus all the other shared channels. It’s like being able to beam the playlists on your iPod to everyone else in the gym while you work out. Except it’s video, not just audio. And the musicians are all naked.

Next Time: Succeeding yet again by bulding what they told us not to build – a glimpse inside the EdgeXD Video Arcade.

Some folks have expressed their confusion over our use of the word “channels” to describe our themed playlists. To understand what the hell we were thinking, it’s necessary to journey back twenty or thirty years to the time when cable TV was first being rolled out successfully across the US. This was going to be the great Entertainment Liberator, the electronic Simón Bolívar (look it up!), promising 100 to 150 channels. And if that wasn’t enough (and it wasn’t), satellite TV came along and promised hundreds more. Never mind that you had to plant one of those enormous fugly dishes in your backyard (or, much later, a smaller fugly dish atop your garage), there was diverse video entertainment to be consumed, and, by all that was holy, we Americans were going to consume it!

It was all about bandwidth, the newly elevated-to-priest-caste techies told us. The more bandwidth there was, the more choices we were all supposed to have. We watched with widening eyes as the cables got fatter, the satellite transponders got digitally widened, the set-top boxes became sophisticated mini-computers, and, still, we waited. One day we woke up, and like a three-card monte’s mark grasping for his 20 dollar bill, we realized we’d been had. Variety and diversity, we learned to our horror, meant the addition of channels devoted to long-canceled TV shows, the Game Show Network, and about thirty different movie channels distinguishable only by their on-air graphics’ degree of annoying intrusiveness. The revolution had come, alright, but if it was being televised, you sure wouldn’t know it by all the crappy programming.

Maybe it was that un-reported palace coup that occurred just after the turn of the century, the one where the techies were over-thrown, exiled back to their server farms by the Marketing wonks. Sure, our new overlords cleaned up nicer and wrote in complete sentences, but any notions of providing consumers with entertainment that might actually have some risk were thrown out in favor of “strengthening the brand.” I can’t speak for you, of course, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to live in a country where the Celebrity Shopping Network is a strong brand.

The worst, the most neglected – it should come as no surprise – were the porn channels. All that fiber, all those satellites, all that sophisticated electronics, for what? A channel devoted to Jenna Jameson? Please! That’s not choice, that’s a punchline! Cable companies, whose only regular creative challenge lies in choosing the color for their bowling league shirts, may be excused for lacking any imagination, but the networks could have tried harder. And we aficionados of adult entertainment, watching the self-serving and anorexic attempts by Playboy and their occasionally spirited but equally clueless imitators to extend their brand at the expense of providing the deeper and more varied kind of porn that was begging to be brought to a wider audience cried out as one, “I could do better!”

And that’s a bit of the inspiration behind EdgeXD’s “Channels.”

We may not be up on satellite (yet), but that doesn’t stop us from presenting a diverse blend of niche adult entertainment feeds, all themed to both rekindle old fantasies and stoke new ones. Some of the channels are clear hat-tips to some of the more traditional adult entertainment sub-genres: “Geisha-On-Demand” is all-Asian, “Innocence Lost” is what the industry has termed “18+/Barely Legal,” and “Ipanema Overdrive” covers Latina and Brazilian stars. But we’re most excited about what I guess we can call our sub-sub-genres, the porn themes that fan our curiosity or reach down deeper and nudge the fantasies we’d almost forgotten we had. Sex in cars, trains, and boats (“Sex Drive”), the clips which explore student-teacher relationships (“Extra Credit”), the use of sex toys (“Some Assembly Required”), and the shenanigans which we just know are going on behind the pulled drapes at the house of the MILF down the block (“Home Schooled”). There’s plenty more where those came from, and we’re adding new channels all the time.

It’s the kind of choice and selection you thought you were buying into when the cable company starting digging up your streets, before you realized that it was really just all about selling more bunny-heads to hang from rearview mirrors.

Next time: Because we’re really not the porn super-geniuses we tell our wives we are, I’ll be writing about how EdgeXD has empowered its subscribers to create and distribute their own channels!

Hi, it’s Brent Chapman again. For this EdgeXD “behind-the-scenes blog” we decided to go really off the radar and journey past the conference room and beyond the studio to just listen in, fly-on-the-wall style, to the commissary, where a meeting of the minds is about to take place:

Lux Kassidy sat at her usual table in the EdgeXD commissary, in the corner furthest away from the widescreen TV and jukebox where the employees were most likely to sit. The room was well-lit, both from the natural early morning light pouring in through two full glass walls separating the room from the outside atrium and an array of over-hanging fluorescents. If there were any shadows to hide in, Lux could not find them – and she had looked hard. It was seven-thirty in the morning, she had just run five miles, and hadn’t bothered with any make-up beyond a thin line of her trademark Lancôme Luminous Tropiques on her lips. She was still limned with sweat from her run, and her paper-thin cotton gym shorts were damp and had climbed uncomfortably even further up her legs than they rose normally. The sports bra beneath her over-sized Lakers jersey itched. Lux was hungry.

But she was disciplined. Lux was eating a half grapefruit very slowly, to make it last. It would have to stave off her hunger until she allowed herself a medium chopped salad at midday. Her long, blond-nearly-platinum hair was tied up into a ponytail which protruded from the back of a black baseball cap with the company logo on front. She ate scrunched down in her chair, cap pulled low over her face. She wanted no distractions. Her plan was to go unnoticed, get in, eat, get out.

She was very nearly successful.

Heather Vandeven had piled the last bit of food onto her tray and was looking for a place to sit.

Oh God. It’s her. Maybe she won’t notice me…

Heather was dressed in a strapless red evening gown that clung to her form as if it was drawn on. What the hell kept that thing up? Magnets? Centrifugal force? She strode about as gracefully in the matching red four-inch heels as a normal human walked barefoot. The light streamed in from the atrium and caught the Austrian crystals which dangled from her ears. Sparks and rainbows twinkled briefly from Heather’s face. Like an angel, once fallen, now revealed for those privileged few who knew how to scrye for such things. She was looking Lux’s way.
I’m invisible I’m invisible I’m invisible I’m invisible…

Smiling, Heather strode towards Lux’s corner of the room.

Look busy…

Lux pulled her cap lower, and took a sheaf of folders and papers out of her backpack on the floor by her chair and spread them onto the table before her. Then she turned her face toward the rear wall, avoided eye contact, held her breath…

“Hiya Lux! Mind if I join you?”

Busted…

“Sure. Pop a squat.” Lux un-scrunched her posture, stuffed the folders back into her backpack unopened, and untwisted her head. She took her face into both her hands and twisted it to nearly a forty-five degree angle. Neck vertebrae popped slowly, audibly. Then she noticed what Heather had been carrying. “What ya got there?”

The tray was filled with half a bagel smeared with raisin walnut cream cheese, a large cup filled with fruit slices, a cup of coffee, a cup of OJ, three thick slices of French toast covered in powdered sugar, and a side of home fries.

“Breakfast!” Heather answered, the teeth in her smile impossibly white. “Want some?”

“Thanks, but I’ve grown partial to my coronary arteries,” Lux explained. “You’re all dolled up and in early,” It was unusual for the EdgeXD suits to schedule Vandeven for any work before noon. They usually got her out before six, too.

Must be that whole, big, Miss“Penthouse Pet-of-the-Year” thing, Lux thought. I gotta get me a better agent.

“I’ve got a publicity shoot for the hotel business at noon, but I promised Sunny I’d lend her some moral support before she does her scene with Rocco.”

“That big bald guy?!” Lux stopped chewing and put her fork down. Her eyes were wide. “He’s got a dick like a mamba!”

Heather giggled. Again with the white teeth. “Sounds like fun.”

“So long as you don’t have any long bike rides planned for the next couple of days,” Lux said.

“What do they have you working on today?” Heather wanted to know. “Or is it ‘who’?”

“I just stopped by to grab some free breakfast.” Lux poured herself a glass of purified water from the thermos she kept in her backpack. “I’m off today.”

“Wow, lucky you! Any plans?”

“I’m going to the gym.”

Heather waited. She nodded slightly, smiling, wordlessly encouraging Lux to continue.

“What? That’s it! I’m going to the gym! What’s your problem? It’s Wednesday, I isolate my tri-lats on Wednesdays.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Heather shrugged. “Show those damn tri-lats who’s boss, right?”

“Oh, you don’t understand…”

At that moment three of EdgeXD.com’s Czech developers burst into the commissary, opening the double doors with a bang. Most likely they had spent the night in their cubicles; a big patch was scheduled to go live on the site later that evening. One of the coders was even dressed in pajamas and carried a stuffed penguin. Another was using a wireless remote to control a palm-sized helicopter as it buzzed the elderly Mexican short-order cook who worked the omelet grill at the buffet. These were guys who clearly marched to a different drummer, and the rest of the band preferred it that way. The third coder was a full head and half taller than his companions, broad of chest, and with a movie star’s square-jawed good looks. The picture of virile perfection was marred somewhat by the man’s right arm which was in a cast from palm to elbow and hung in a sling at his side.

Lux recognized the big guy, and stood up to call him out. “Well, if it isn’t the former tech college league arm-wrestling champ of Upper South Moravia!”

The trio stopped in their tracks, surprised. The R/C helicopter dropped into a bowl of waffle batter.

“Whaddya say, Miklos! Wanna go for best two out of three?” Lux shouted across the room.

“Screw you, Lux!” the software developer shouted back, and turned his back to her.

“In your dreams, code-monkey!”

Miklos’ companions laughed and slapped the big man on his back. Pajama-boy reached up to playfully pinch his cheek as they walked to the breakfast buffet line. Miklos slapped him hard in the back of the head with his one functioning fist.

Lux sat back down, a grin transforming her face for the first time that day. “I think he likes me!”

“Lux, why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

Heather shook her head. “I mean, I dunno, if I had to guess I’d say a lot of guys are probably turned off by the whole Xena routine. It’s like they have to ‘best you in battle’ before they can fuck you,” she said.

“If that were the case I’d never get laid,” Lux responded wistfully. She poked at the grapefruit with her fork and pouted.

“So, it’s Wednesday…” Heather began.

“Nothing gets past you,” Lux said.

“Wednesday,” Heather continued. “Time to start thinking about the weekend! Jean-Paul is flying me into San Jose by helicopter to watch him play against the Red Wings, and then we’re going out to Catalina on one of his teammate’s yachts.” She poured three sugar packets into her coffee and took a sip. “What are your plans for Saturday night?”

Lux looked away, developing a sudden interest in her nails, then suddenly shoved an enormous slice of grapefruit into her mouth. She mumbled a garbled response through a mouthful of pulp.

“I’m sorry, Hon,” Heather leaned forward. “I didn’t catch what you said.”

“MMM UUKKNNNNGGGGT”

“Lux, sweetie, it sounds you’re saying ‘MMM UUKKNNNNGGGGT.’”

“My Accountant!” Lux spit the pulp out onto her plate. “My accountant, okay?! I’m meeting with my accountant! I need to convert out of gold and into T-Bills and I can’t do that by myself! Saturday night was the only time he had open! What are you, my fuckin’ biographer?”

“Okay, okay! Let’s just change the subject, okay?”

“Okay,” Lux said.

“Okay,” Heather said again.

They ate in silence for nearly a minute, before Heather continued, “Ooh, did you hear? I did the Stern show last week!”

“Really? How’d it go?” Lux asked, not really caring how it went at all. The only way should have cared how it went would be if a pack of hyenas had escaped from the Central Park Zoo, found their way to Howard’s studio, and ripped Heather’s clothes off her body before chasing her shrieking through the streets of Manhattan, and Lux figured if that had happened she would have already read about it on Drudge, so there was nothing Vandeven was going to say to her now that would interest her.

“Ohhh, it was absolutely FANTASTIC!” Heather slapped both hands onto the Formica, making the trays jump and the silverware rattle. “They are so wonderful there, and Howard has been so helpful with my career. It was really magical!”

“Magical,” Lux repeated.

“I’ve put the pictures up on my Facebook, and Brent says he’s going to put them on our site, too!”

“That’ll be magical, too” Lux said. She lost any appetite for the grapefruit.

“I don’t think I mentioned Opie and Anthony…” Heather began.

“Lookit, Heather, don’t you think you might be spreading yourself a little too thin?” Lux asked pointedly.

Heather frowned. She cut a large slab of French toast off with her fork, and washed it down her throat with a half glass of orange juice. “How so?”

“Maybe you should spend more time with your family?”

Heather’s brow furled. She gnawed on her bagel, clearly deep in thought.

Finally: “You know, you’re probably right.”

“There you see?”

“You’re such a good friend, Lux!” Heather reached across her French toast to grip Lux’s hand.

“The Circle of Life, “ Lux said, smiling. “We’re all a part of it.”

“Wait a minute, I don’t have any family!” Heather pulled her hand back. “Shit, what a relief! I can’t begin to imagine slowing down! I did Opie and Anthony last week, too, did I tell you? Talk about MAGICAL! Those guys are the best! Such gentlemen, you would never guess. Don’t worry, those pictures are going up on the site, too!”

Heather took out her iPhone and began furiously swiping and typing.

“What are you doing?” Lux asked.

“I’m Twittering about our breakfast together!” Heather said. “You have to do these things while their still fresh in your head.” She continued to type into the phone with one hand while spooning some home fries into her mouth. Between bites, she wondered aloud, “I wonder if Rocco will mind if I post photos from today’s shoot onto my blog?”

I get this all the time: “How’re you going to compete with the tube sites? Isn’t subscription adult entertainment dead? Who still pays for porn?”

Of course, these same doom-mongers were last seen dropping shovelfuls of dirt into the premature grave of the music industry – right up until the night Apple shot a bolt of lightning through the not-quite-dead-yet corpse and unleashed the monster that is iTunes. Now, I may not be Steve Jobs (I’m a snazzier dresser, for one), but it’s clear to me that EdgeXD is poised to have the same countryside-clearing effect on the adult entertainment industry.

Entertainment options across all media have increased exponentially. (I don’t know if that’s literally true, cuz I don’t know how big a number “exponentially” is, and I’ve never met anyone who did. But stay with me on this one…) The number of hours in a day, however, has remained the same, sadly. People want to find what they want to watch fast, and they want the experience of watching said stuff to be as big, beautiful, and bug-free as technologically possible. Organization matters. Search matters. The player and the streaming matter. And the tube sites fail epic in all these areas.

Now, I don’t see this in other mainstream online portals. Most outfits get it. The aforementioned iTunes gets it. Amazon gets it. They make finding what you are looking for fast and easy, It’s a combination of appreciation for their customers’ own knowledge respect for their time, and also a desire to introduce them to other goods similar to their purchases right at the point of sale. There is a joy in discovery, but there is no joy in slogging through screen after screen filled with box art for porn videos having absolutely no correlation to the type of content you want to see. If Amazon made you sift through the latest new releases of romance novels before you found the techno-thrillers for which you came, they’d be in the dot-com Loser Hall of Fame alongside Kozmo (look it up!).

…And if I hear the old trope about how porn distributors are the first to embrace new technologies – as if this somehow excuses geeks from providing proper customer service – I’m going to hit somebody with my Betamax player. The addictive qualities of porn may embolden some distributors to relax their customer retention efforts, but it does not obviate the basic shopkeeper’s responsibility of providing a neat and clean storefront. The Porn 2.0 industry has broken new ground with very sophisticated algorithms to extract and move content more efficiently from one distributor to another, and gobs more adult entertainment is accessible online than ever before. But none of these back-stage raised-floor server-room initiatives help viewers manage all that new content the way our Stash does. Distributors have become so fixated upon the mathematics of pornography that they have lost site of the art. EdgeXD is less algebra, and more elegance.

In the mean time, we’re having an absolutely amazing success with our SportsQuiz^XD (www.sportsquizxd.com). It’s distribution and popularity have gone viral, driving new subscribers to the site by the thousands. It’s the type of old school guerilla marketing that has never been taught in tube school, because it can’t be performed by a shell script. Ultimately, EdgeXD won’t be successful because it’s machines are making connections with another guy’s machines; we’ll be successful because we’re making connections with our subscribers.