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.

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.

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!

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?”

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.

]]> http://edgebrent.com/2009/07/gobs-and-monsters-marketing-in-the-tubes-shadow/feed/ 0 http://edgebrent.com/2009/06/the-fourth-interview/ http://edgebrent.com/2009/06/the-fourth-interview/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:17:48 +0000 Brent Chapman http://edgebrent.com/?p=20 When I was a kid shopping with my mom I used to pull the tags off the clothes on the racks at Macy’s.
This is your introduction to my tagging database blog? An expose of your dysfunctional and delinquent childhood?

I’m just saying… I don’t understand how you put a “tag” on a video.
It’s not a physical object, it’s metadata: “data about the data.” In this case, the original datum is the digital video file – the porn clip. The metadata describes the clip.

I liked that you said “datum.”
Three years of high school Latin, it can’t be helped.

What can you track in a porn clip? The names of the performers?
If the clip features top-drawer performers, such as Lux Kassidy or Heather Vandeven or Sunny Leone, sure. But in a business that boasts a new generation of stars every eighteen months, we’ve found that viewers are more interested in the “whats” and “wheres” and “how manys” than they are in the “whos.” So that’s what we give them.

So how does it work?
Our taggers, people with a skill-sets and sensibilities entirely different from their Macy’s counterparts, screen every clip and note everything worth noting. Woman’s hair color, breast size, what she is wearing (for however briefly), what acts are being performed, and where, et cetera. The taggers embed this information into the actual timeline of the video, and that data is entered into the search engine database that powers the entire site.

So if wanted to find, say, a large-nippled buxom red-head in a latex nurse’s uniform giving a blow-job, your guys are tracking that…?
You’re scaring me, but yes. And you illustrate a fundamental point: what makes for a good sex video, it should come as no surprise, is a highly personal subject. Sexual fantasies may in fact be the ultimate niche market. That’s exactly the business we’re in, and that’s exactly where the competition falls short. People can subscribe to “all Asian” or “all barely legal” or “all MILF” sites all day long, but these categorizations are still too broad. With our search capabilities, fed by the copious data and minutiae which our taggers track, EdgeXD subscribers can fine-tune their fantasies. More fun still, they can broaden their sexual horizons in a gradual and informed way, similar to the way music lovers have been using Last.fm and Pandora.com to expand their musical horizons. What EdgeXD offers is Discovery.

A lot of sites now incorporate widgets and code from Google and Yahoo. Is this what powers Edge’s search?
EdgeXD’s tagging mechanism and search engine is all custom designed and made, built from the ground up by our developers in a secret laboratory in Prague.

Really?
Well, it’s more like a detached garage owned by the father of our senior developer, but they’ve covered the walls with those mock blueprints of the spaceships in Star Wars to make it look like a secret laboratory. We don’t pay them a lot so it’s in our best interest to humor them.

Is Content still king?

More than it ever was. The novelty of the Web has worn off, probably faster than any electronic medium in history. It’s become as ubiquitous and essential as plumbing, and like plumbing, fewer and fewer people know or care how it works. All that matters is what comes out the end. The one component of that which not everyone saw, and an area where many of our rivals are still playing catch-up, is high definition video. Everything we create – and we are creating a lot of original content, which is also unusual for a start-up – is in HD. We saw it as a way of not only future-proofing our titles from the get-go, but as a means of clearly underscoring Edge’s commitment to quality in every aspect of adult entertainment.

Does the Technology influence the choice of content in any way?

Adult entertainment has always driven the adoption of new technologies, but we think it can drive acceptance of innovative story-telling techniques as well. We have an original movie – we’re not even sure we should call it a “movie” – that unfolds as video, e-mails, text messages, scribbled exchanges on social networking sites. If we could figure out how to make a downloadable ringtone relevant to the plot, we would have included that as well (Maybe we still will; relevance is over-rated). But the point is, the notion of the radio or TV screen as the tribal bonfire around which we all gather at set times throughout the day is crumbling. Nothing is happening in single-focus real time anymore, everything is time-shifted, on-demand, dripping in metadata, delivered to multiple screens and mobile gadgets. Why shouldn’t porn mirror that?

I’ve seen the bit in the FAQ warning potential users that their computers may not be good enough to experience EdgeXD. Are you afraid you might be too far ahead of the curve?

No, because that curve comes ’round the bend pretty quickly. And really, it’s the game makers who are pushing the envelope and are in bed with the video card makers. We are on the high end, and we’ll take the initiative to stay on the high end, because that’s where our clientèle live as well. Not everybody is a BMW driver, but these days I’d rather own BMW than Chrysler.

Edge owns more than 5,000 hours of adult entertainment. It can’t all be HD, can it?

No, everything we shoot, we shoot HD, but we have acquired a few SD libraries containing some absolutely wonderful and startling stuff. Plot-driven, every imaginable type of location, strong ensemble performances – and some incredibly beautiful women. These are thoughtful, funny movies, with healthy budgets. Some of it is really dark, and that’s fine, too. And a good part of the library has been imported, featuring video that has never before been available in the US.

Is There really that much of a difference, outside of the language? Sex is sex, no?

No. Even some aficionados do not realize the degree to which the society in which they live affects not only their entertainment options – what they are allowed to watch – but their perceptions and appreciation. Differing sexual mores in parts of Asia, Europe, and South America all have a marked effect on the adult entertainment produced in those places, and viewing it can be a whole different sensation for a North American audience. But although adult entertainment is extremely local, the Web is global, and we think that a premium site like EdgeXD has an obligation to bring our subscribers nothing but the best, without boundaries. And besides, some of that German stuff is absolutely amazing…

Is there Antarctic porn?

It’s just penguins, and they were spooked by our cameras and wouldn’t cooperate.

Seriously?

No.

Will EdgeXD feature any Amateur porn?

We have also acquired some of the “reality” entertainment that has been very popular for quite some time as well. Much of this features amateur performers, and there is no denying the charm of “the first timers.” But of course much of the amateur/reality/gonzo shows are, by their very nature, one trick ponies shot on the cheap, and we are going out of our way to showcase the quality of our video player and the intricacies possible through our search engine, so it behooves us to run with the best-looking and most “complex” porn we can acquire. We think that the best sex is not only consensual, it is contextual.

You’re adding new content every week; do subscribers just re-enter their favorite search terms to find it?

We’ll be highlighting our new stuff, as well as the best of the archive material, as it all begins to populate the servers. There will be plenty of homepage promotions, and new Featured Channels will be introduced. At EdgeXD there’s always a lot of hand-holding, a lot of discovery going on, and that’s as it should be.

The Television Networks talk about “Appointment TV.” Is there “Appointment Porn?”

Yes, but that’s on Craig’s List, and it’s a different business model entirely.

You again.

They’ve Asked Me to Talk to You About Your Greatest Invention, “The Stash.”
“They” need to find some marketable skills; and besides, it’s hardly my invention. It’s more like a common sense idea that just has not been very commonly implemented any place else on the Web.

How is That?
Our “Stash” is just like a bookmark. Now, everybody knows how Internet bookmarking works, it’s been a way of life since the days of Netscape and Mosaic: you store pages in your Web browser for easy access later. Our “Stash” allows you to store and retrieve your favorite parts of EdgeXD: video clips, photo galleries, articles – even entire channels, or an item for sale in our “Black Market” – as easily as you might bookmark a Web page. Find it, play it, store it.

Is It All Really That Difficult to Keep Track of?
EdgeXD subscribers have thousands and thousands of clips and photos available to them; hundreds are added weekly. It’s true that we’ve developed a deep-tagging database that allows subscribers to find what they are looking for quickly, but the journey of discovery is more than half the fun – again, just like it was in the days of Netscape and Mosaic. And EdgeXD, along with its “Stash” functionality, is positioned to become the central signpost for adult content on the Web the way a list of bookmarks is for everything else.

It’s the “EdgeXD as Sherpa Guide” Paradigm Again.
Look, EdgeXD subscribers spend hours browsing, exploring, discovering… We’ve got over a dozen channels already, and the number is growing: destinations like “Sex Drive,” for sex in cars and trains; “Geisha-on-Demand,” an Asian-themed channel; “Extra Credit,” for encounters in a scholastic setting…

…“Ipanema Overdrive” for Brazilian women. That’s Funny.
You’re easily amused. And EdgeXD subscribers have the ability to share the contents of their “Stash” with others in the EdgeXD community, the way some social networking sites allow their users to share favorite web links. So, think of “The Stash” as a naked del.icio.us. Digg, with dildos. A red-light district Reddit.

I would, but then I’d need a shower.
You see? It’s a neat idea. But even so, it wasn’t rocket science: we had to add “The Stash,” because there is simply so much content on the site. “The Stash” is the way an EdgeXD subscriber controls his entertainment, it’s his Tivo.

His “Tivo with Tits!”
You’re the writer, not me.

So the Paradigm is: the Subscriber as Creator?
Close: The subscriber as Curator. And if you use the word “paradigm” again, this interview’s over. We view “The Stash” as the very essence of the site, the biological center of a complete adult eco-system. It’s a one-click tool that allows our subscribers to build their own adult entertainment theme parks, and then open the gates of those parks to their friends.

Is Everybody’s “Stash” Open for Public Viewing?
Freud would have a field day! No, everyone’s “Stash” defaults as private. Once a subscriber has created a channel, he has the option to name, describe, and share that channel publicly. Other subscribers can then rate this user-generated channel. We expect to attract all the folks on the ‘Net who regard themselves as adult entertainment connoisseurs and taste-makers, and there are a lot of them.

So Do You Think “The Stash” is the Greatest Thing About EdgeXD?
No, I think “Ipanema Overdrive” is. But your mileage may vary. ]]> http://edgebrent.com/2009/05/the-second-interview-with-top-shelf-media-partners-president-brent-chapman-in-which-he-explains-%e2%80%9cthe-stash%e2%80%9d-to-you/feed/ 0 http://edgebrent.com/2009/03/q-a-with-top-shelf-media-partners-president-brent-chapman-about-edgexd/ http://edgebrent.com/2009/03/q-a-with-top-shelf-media-partners-president-brent-chapman-about-edgexd/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:11:30 +0000 Brent Chapman http://edgebrent.com/?p=3

So… you’re launching a porn website.
Yes.

1997 just called, it wants its business model back.
(laughing) A lot of stuff got thrown at the wall in 1997, and not much of it stuck. EdgeXD will succeed in no small part because our search capabilities allow consumers to filter out the noise and find what they want quickly. A lot’s changed in the last decade, but there is still only 24 hours in a day, no amount of technology can change that. People want to find the videos that are meaningful to them fast, and we understand that. The current adult business, pre-EdgeXD, is just a game of monthly eyeballs and pageviews. They do not focus upon what their customers want, or who they even are, beyond the numbers in their churn rate. That’s your 1997. But nobody is calling them on it, they get a pass.

So what’s the difference between EdgeXD and all the porn sites getting a free pass?
For one, the original content that we produce for Edge is all shot in HD. The player which we have devised is bar none the greatest video viewing experience for adult entertainment on the Internet: instant play, no stuttering, no buffering, the kind of experience that a consumer in the era of 1080i has come to expect and has a right to demand. You simply cannot expect today’s savvy consumer to walk away from the HD flatscreen in his living room and be comfortable watching what passes for full-motion on 95% of the adult sites. I’m a TV guy, I’ve got very little patience for low video quality. Adult webmasters have always upheld — behind closed doors, of course — that due to the outlaw and addictive nature of their content, they did not have to compete on video quality. EdgeXD fires a shot across that bow. We sink them, actually.

So you’re the Hulu of porn?
That’s a part of it. We’re also the category’s Google. At a time when even the website for your local YMCA is providing internal searching and site maps, your average commercial porn site is no better than an online catalog, something to be paged through in the hope of finding an item you’d like. Our database-driven content discovery system provides a heuristic experience that not only makes it easy for our subscribers to find what they want, but lets them save every piece of media, every query, every object, everything good, in we’re calling their “stash.” We remember their preferences, and make intelligent, meticulously-curated suggestions based upon that knowledge. With each iteration of software, the beta is less like an adult site and more like a high-end gentlemen’s club. The difference between EdgeXD and its competition is as wide as the gap between a bit torrent and Last.fm or Pandora.com.

Last.fm, what does that have, about a thousand subscribers…?
Last.fm was purchased for 280 million by CBS, who are smarter than you.

You think somebody will pay 280 million for EdgeXD?
Again, that’s a very 20th century sensibilty, and it’s not the way we think. Our endgame is simply to provide the best user experience for the most compelling and addictive content within the most pervasive medium, and we are well-funded and in this for the long run. But I will say, there’s no longer enough oxygen in the room to support all these small random players. Even the old-century commercial sites, the Playboys, Penthouses, are cannibalizing each other, they’re in a death spiral, paralyzed by the free torrents. The entire adult industry — not just the Internet pie — is about to consolidate in a major way. Victory will not go to the fourteen year-old entrepreneurs who have amassed the most AVI’s of Jenna Jameson on a server in their mom’s basement, but to the company with the best complete consumer experience. EdgeXD is going to own that table at which everyone will want to have a seat.

Okay. So you’re wringing order from the damp dishrag of porn chaos.
Nice. We’re looking for snarky writers. You want a job?

Thanks, I’m good. But why will people start paying for porn?
Why do people pay for music? Because the user experience for the free offerings — and I choose the word “user” here purposefully, there is no sense of customer service — is dreadful. Apple launched iTunes at the very height of Napster’s popularity, and has grown it into a multi-billion dollar brand in a very short period of time. They gambled that charging a reasonable fee for high-quality customer service would trump free content, and they were rewarded with the first and biggest business success story of the 21st century. Napster hasn’t gone away, and bit torrent usage is even more prevalent now then when iTunes first launched, but the tremendous popularity of Apple’s venture only underscores the fact that it brought — it continues to bring — new customers to the genre. EdgeXD will have the same siren effect on the current non-porn consumer: People who never in a million years would watch adult entertainment in the garish low-rent red-light district that adult websites made out of the category will find the experience so compelling at EdgeXD they’ll be asking, “where have you been all my life?”

Okay. You mentioned Playboy. They possess one of the quintessential brands, and they compete in your space. Aren’t you scared?
It’s all past tense with Playboy, sadly. Forty years ago, Playboy was patting itself on the back because the manufacturers of truck tire splash-guards were licensing their bunny ears, and they still think it’s all about paper magazines and car air fresheners. Our idea of branding is to see the EdgeXD logo in neon above a bar in a space station within Eve Online. Our audience is the same demographic that’s made the videogame industry a twenty-two billion dollar business last year. They are young, they are gadgeteers, and they view Playboy’s quaint hedonism the way their fathers viewed bathtub gin.

The Internet tubes are littered with the bookmarked corpses of well-funded TV guys who tried to hang up a broadband shingle.
Most of whom deserved to die, but it really wasn’t their fault. Look, whenever a new medium starts to garner buzz, there is a migration of both content and content-wranglers into the new space. It’s a gold rush, but it usually results in “shovelware:” wrap your content in a new codec and just toss it onto a new distribution, with no sense of what makes that new medium “new.” Our Web experience will break new ground and be indelibly memorable for no other reason than we utilize the latest database and personalization technology to its maximum extent. But also the Web is not the be-all end-all of EdgeXD’s offering; the website is a nexus, a touchstone. EdgeXD content will be available on mobile devices, television, within virtual worlds — everywhere young people interact. Original EdgeXD content will be crafted to play across multiple media, video stories that begin on the site will continue as a text message, maybe end as choose-your-adventure interactive fiction. Our talent will interact with their fans on Facebook, share their playlists on Mog, they’ll twitter the blow-by-blow (one should pardon the expression) on the set as we shoot our original movies. Porn is the most intimate and personal of any entertainment genre, yet it’s presented in every medium as though it were pictures at a museum exhibition. Why are there GPS-powered mobile apps to help you find the best sushi spot near you, but none that provide the same kind of adult-themed utility?

There’s a sophomoric off-color remark I could make here, but won’t.
Good choice. ]]> http://edgebrent.com/2009/03/q-a-with-top-shelf-media-partners-president-brent-chapman-about-edgexd/feed/ 0