paul smith's Snaps & Bytes e-home
March 2006: Company Profile feature on Strictly Broadband in London, visited 7/02/06. "Plug (in) and Play".
Strictly Broadband is the UK's biggest player in the rapidly developing adult Video On Demand (VOD) market. ETO visited their offices, a five-minute walk from Camden Lock in west London, to discover more about them.
Jerry Barnett, MD, founded Strictly Broadband in late 2004, having been a web technology developer for over ten years. Starting at the beginning, he told us how he'd got involved in digital vice when built his first adult site about nine years ago.
"I'd an open mind and no particular aversion to porn so there wasn't any real resistance when I was contacted to create an adult site. Hosting photos and stories (7,200bits/s transfer speeds not being uncommon in those days) rather than films, I initially believed there was too much porn freely available via bulletin boards to make a commercial site work. But the customer was happy to spend the money, and I was happy to make the site, and was glad to be proved wrong. Now I've run a technology business called Go Content for ten years, and developed Strictly Broadband along side it. There was an idea I'd been working on for five or so years - Pay Per View streaming movies. Like most people back then I overestimated future download speeds. The view was everyone would have ADSL by 2001, whereas the reality is it's taken until 2005 to come into its own. I'd gone around the industry a few times and tried to sell the idea to some of the leading adult brands, none of whom thought it was much of a goer. Everyone was very focused on his or her own business and perhaps weren't amenable to being told that they might not necessarily be doing all the right things. Then we built a successful site for Private Barcelona, which we still run that for them; Private Speed. Based on that success I put the concept together for Strictly Broadband and found a few people in the industry interested enough to invest so we were able to get off the ground. It wasn't a cheap project. We needed to get a lot of movies available quickly and put some strong marketing together. The site went live in March 2005 and went haywire, in the business sense, July/August time last year."
The backbone of the business is software that Jerry's other business, Go Content, developed for secure Pay-Per-View. It's also called Go Content and uses advanced DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection to guard against copying and piracy. Streaming has several advantages over downloading, one being it's easy to fast forward and rewind it, which you can't do with a download until it's fully transferred. When asked about the technical side of the business, Barnett was happy to explain how it works.
"Techies like the idea of downloading and storing stuff on their hard drive, but the average user likes to be presented with a play button and to click it for a very DVD-like experience. With Windows-based set-top-boxes coming on, streamed content's only going to get bigger as it leaves the PC behind and becomes another way of getting TV. The way our service works, anyone can access their account, from any 512Kb/s or faster broadband-connected PC (as Microsoft don't have an up-to-date media player for the Mac, it's just PCs with version 10 of Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer at the moment. Firefox support is coming though) anywhere in the world, and after watching the film no trace of it's left on the computer. All they need is their password and lists of their current movies and expired rentals are available for inspection. Unfortunately Real and Quicktime just aren't suited to the type of streaming we use. If they were, we'd support them as well as WMP. As it is, we've had to put ourselves in Bill Gates' hands."
Although London is one of the most expensive places to site a business and internet-based Strictly Broadband could be managed from practically anywhere, Jerry has good reasons to stay in the capital.
"It's because this is where we already are, to some extent. Go Content, the software, is the technology that powers Strictly Broadband and Go Content, the business, has always been in London. Our hosting is now done in Amsterdam on our own servers. Since it's not obscene content, as defined by the courts, we could host it in the UK. It's kept in Holland because it's cheaper as much as anything. Since we're a British business we'd be open to prosecution wherever we kept anything too unsavoury, to be honest. We hop over once a month or so to maintain relationships, but all the staff are here."
To ensure folk renting from Strictly Broadband will only have a low-key name appearing on their card statement, they make use of one their investor's banking facilities as a part of that working partnership. However, independence is important to Barnett.
"As the company's majority shareholder I run the business and have control over the finances. In terms of putting a figure to our profits I don't want to put all our cards on the table, but we're growing at 10-15% month-on-month at the moment and we're on target to do something between a half and one million pounds of business this year. We're simply offering the right product at the right time. ADSL has rolled out so fast now that any serious surfer, porn-fan or not, will have broadband at home. While there are lots of adult sites selling downloads or streaming, our main difference is we offer known films you'd see in any sex shop. It's attractive to customers to know what they'll be getting from us in advance. They say 'content is king' and we've now got over 400 full-length films, mostly UK titles, many of them with any extra features you'd see on the DVD as a bonus. By providing the same products you'd buy in any licensed shop as rentals, our customers are 100% confident about what they're getting. Porn online is generally rather anonymous, mixed quality at best, unknown stars (an oxymoron, I should think) and taken-out-of-context clips. Ours isn't."
Getting any business noticed online isn't easy, but SB has a few tricks up its Yahoo: "Hopefully anyone typing Strictly Broadband in will find us! I think we do ok in search engine listings but getting up Google is a major black art. We're obviously competing with lots and lots of people out there but another big part of our success is our affiliate programme, which we promote in ETO. We're always looking for new affiliates. Any adult business with customers who might make use of an online adult movie library is of interest to us and we'll build for them. If they want a branded site, with their colours and logos, we'll do that for them for free as well. We set the whole thing up and then it's up to them to promote it. Some sex shops will put a flyer in every bag with the name and URL of their branded version of the site, some people will promote it from their own web site. A bit of print advertising in The Sport and so on. We tried a scratch card for Erotica as an experiment for ourselves but for now we've decided that idea's not a goer."
AJ, who has the official title of 'Porn Lord' on her business cards, joined the firm in December 2004 after replying to an online ad she'd seen. She used to handle the film uploading but her prime roles are now as site designer, editor and journalist. As well as creating the distinctive looks for affiliate sites, she writes all the enticing blurbs for each film.
"I applied for a job through Gumtree, did a free sample for Jerry and came onboard part-time to begin with. Initially it was going to be a couple of months work but then there was always more work to do and before long I was indispensable. Strictly Broadband is essentially Jerry and me, working in the same office space as seven other Go Content staff."
Having seen a photo of her licking someone's boot in the current issue of Skin Two magazine, it's fair to say AJ's not the shy retiring type who had to be turned on to work for a sexy business. That's turned on in the encouraged sense. Seeing them listed on the site, we had to ask her what's erotic about spitting and just what is gonzo fucking.
"Spitting's a big thing in America and it's actually quite a popular fetish, if you look at it in context of rough sex. Say a guy spits on a girl's arse before penetrating her, that's a sort of spontaneous thing. A lot of people are confused by the concept until they see how it fits into a bigger scene. Then they'll realise it has its place and can actually be quite hot. Gonzo is just fucking. No pretence, no obvious acting, no plot. It's a porn film and everyone knows what they're there for. It's just guys with cameras and girls with smiles (etc.) on their faces and because it's filmed in a very raw way it feels ultra-real. Very intimate, like you're part of the experience."
Hot Movies, who you'll see in ETO every month, are Strictly Broadband's biggest competitors, but have a different approach to VOD. For example they charge by the minute, whereas SB has a flat rate that gets customers access to a whole film for three days. That's long enough for a customer to enjoy some private time with the title, invite friends back from the pub to watch it, and on the third night, cuddle up with their girlfriend to watch it again. There's nothing to stop them hiring several films at once either. Jerry outlined other differences in the service they offer.
"Unlike Hot Movies, our content is only really promoted in the UK and is mostly R18 approved, with some well-known European and US studios' material, and our streaming quality is better. At 1Mb/s it's almost as good as DVD, and with 8Mb/s lines becoming more available we'll be supplying HDTV quality streams in future. By only supplying full films, not little clips, we feel we're not cheapening the content. If you allow people to just dip into films for a few minutes, that film's not being watched as the makers intended, and we feel that's not doing the studio any favours."
AJ added, "Because they're getting it for three days, our 40,000 customers can watch some scenes one night, and experience the whole film the next. That way they'll get to know which studios, directors and girls they like rather than shooting from one disjointed scene to the next."
With an eye on possible changes to the legality of certain, currently permitted themes and acts, Jerry continued: "There's also the issue with non-UK firm's 'international content' if our government get their legislation against 'Violent Porn' through. The most extreme material you'll find with many other VOD suppliers is harsh bondage, Japanese 'beaten to within an inch of their lives' S&M stuff, which would definitely be illegal to posses or view here if the government get their way. Ours is carefully vetted to adhere to the R18 guidelines so we'll not run up against the law for promoting it in the UK. We also take a strong line on security. We have NetNanny and CyberSurfer amongst others on our site, meaning it's easily blocked by anyone with parental controlled access software. That way the likes of MSN are more comfortable about sending us some of their porn-search traffic. You see it makes commercial sense to be responsible. Another thing we have is while we do take all major credit and debit cards for secure payment, we don't take Solo or Electron cards, which can be issued to younger people. We get the odd email saying 'Please close this account. My son opened it with my card without my knowledge and I'd like a refund' and we do that. We can only police that to some extent and the moral issue of a seventeen-year-old 'borrowing' their parents' card - well, that has to be the parent's lookout and responsibility to some extent. There isn't a hard-and-fast way of doing age verification online, especially with fraudulent card use, but we do all we can to keep our material for adults only. It's only really been attempted in Germany, with an ID scheme where you had to visit the post office… All that did there was kill the porn market. Here the police aren't worried about who accesses our content so much as what that content is."
After taking a quick call (four more possible sites based on the Strictly Broadband model. Can't be bad) he continued, "One of our affiliate's 'White Label' sites will typically make them 30% of any rental. Our flat rate is £6.99 for 72-hour access to a film. Or, if you buy five tickets at a time, which don't expire and can be used one at a time, or all together, they're £5.99 each. That's less than thirty pounds for up to 360 hours of uncut, branded adult entertainment. A pound for 12 hours of good clean fun - we usually have at least 600 simultaneous rentals and can scale our streaming capability up indefinitely to handle extra traffic when we get it. Studios also use our technology and by becoming an affiliate they'll earn around 55% of the ticket price, which is their cut plus royalties. As we source directly from studios there's no middleman. We sign a contract to handle their films and take it from there. We have UK, Dutch, German, Canadian and American suppliers and we're adding about sixty titles a month. So that's a couple a day, every day, at about 1.5Gb each. Since we only use well-known studios there's little UK-friendly content we'll turn away. Although AJ has said 'please don't put this on the site' to me in the past, and because it wasn't well filmed or lit, we didn't include it. In a way it's not for us to choose what goes on the site. We're a retailer and if there's something we consider isn't that great but it sells really well, it's not up to us to stop people renting it. An example would be the Abi Titmuss video. Badly shot, 17 minutes long, voiceover by John Leslie - it's not quality stuff by any stretch of the imagination but since their curiosity has people spending money on it, we're happy to take it."
With more and more studios knocking on Strictly Broadband's door (or more accurately ringing their bell. But be careful which button is pressed. Their second and third floor offices are above a charity which, if the notes on the door access buzzer box are meaningful, don't want to be mistaken for Strictly Anything) they don't turn appropriate content away, they prioritise it.
"If I get a pile of new DVDs in from Harmony, or Ben Dover, or Pumpkin, I'll put those straight on the server ahead of any amateur Scandinavian stuff we may have waiting to be added to the site. The more movies on our servers, the more it costs us to host them, which is another reason to focus on recognisable, quality product. We've over half a terabyte of content now but we're dedicated to adding to that to keep the site fresh. At the moment our biggest seller is 'Orgies', which is fairly new to us. British Cum Queens and British Housewives Fantasies from Ben Dover is a double bill and that's been perhaps our best seller over the last few months. Or I should say our best rental title. There was a point the other week when four of our top five titles were Ben Dover - they're very popular. Cathy Barry's stuff is also big business for us: her Diary series for example. Actually, her CathyBarryVOD.com site as an affiliate-programme version of SB, with her picture all over it, her films as the 'home page' selection and what have you. Inflagranti.co.uk is another. In all we have over fifty affiliate and our own themed versions of the site currently live."
On top of her online roles, AJ produces the regular Strictly Broadband newsletter. She added, "I reviewed Orgies in the last edition and that's helped it become popular I think. The Shag My Bitch Up series has been strong too. If you turn to the charts page in ETO you'll see what's been moving for us. We've had a few films exclusive to us. A Wicked City title, staring the ever-popular Donna Marie, went straight to number one and stayed there for a while. Ultimately if a studio has a great product they're not going to want it available only online, but since DVD is a very different market, that's no big problem for us. Renting a stream is cheaper than buying a DVD, more convenient and more immediate. It's instant gratification. In the past you might feel horny, see an ad in the paper, place your order and wait for the postman. What people really want, unless they've found the perfect film for them, is a constantly rotating 'wank-bank'. You also bypass the possible embarrassment of visiting a shop and asking for a 'specialist' title. That also makes our delivery method the perfect way for women to access porn. We had a lovely email from a lady called Faye the other day, praising us to the heavens. How we present our sites is very important and a lot of effort goes into appearance, navigation and ease of use. There are no pop-ups, lying links that seem to carry you away from porn rather than to it, or evil flashing banners. No spam, useless ads, random schemes to make money... We want to be perceived as a classy porn site people can trust. About 20% of our customers are female and we're very keen to keep the design of the site appealing to them. That's why we have a 'Recommended for Women' link on the left to titles I think they'll specifically enjoy, including lots of Anna Span's films. Or there's movies for couples, movies by studio, movies by genre, movies by content and so on."
Two pressing questions that AJ tried to answer for us were just how big is VOD now, and how big is it likely to become. Not easy things to put a figure on, it seems.
"VOD's just another way to access adult content and you shouldn't really regard it as a market on its own. I think AVN came up with a turnover figure for the US of $12billion for the porn market in 2005. That's big. And if the US is $12billion, the rest of the world has to be the same again. We all know porn's big business. VOD is growing massively at the moment, from relatively small volumes, and it's going to cause DVD to suffer in the next one, two, three years. At some point it's going to overtake physical sales, but I couldn't tell you when. For now, the market's unlimited and we're not going to hit a ceiling for quite some time. When our customers sign-up they become a customer with us 'for life'. Unlike a site that has a month's subscription for access to content, with us there's no membership fee; we purely become a service they can dip into whenever they want to. Most of our business is repeat rentals and our weekly e-newsletter, 'Strictly Broadsheet', goes to 30,000 people and maintains the feeling of belonging to a club. I see it as a way of educating free-subscribers about all sorts of adult-related topics, not just what films we have and who's in them. We keep it humorous and not reading like a porn mailer by including a wide range of articles. In the last issue I did a bit on how to get into the industry, for example, and listed the challenges and pitfalls of performing with a camera 3" from your nuts. Yes we have interviews with porn stars, but we try to get away from the 'what's your favourite sexual position' type question. They tend be very interesting, fun people with more to say than what they look for in a guy or how many cocks they've had up their arse. In general, as well as at one time. We're now very pleased how Strictly Broadsheet's building into an online publication and have just started doing 'on location' reports as an eye-opener, with behind-the-scenes photos and chats with the girls, the guys and the production team. Punters are very interested in what happens in the industry and rather than present that as titillation, it's more fun to tell the real 'inside stories'."
Which we think would be a good title for the feature. While Strictly Broadband's content is all bought in, a few weeks ago their office did feature as the backdrop to a film being shot for MSS. AJ was loosely described as being 'on hand to assist' but Jerry assures ETO that neither of them made a guest appearance.
"There was a bit of a point of contention on Monday morning actually. A few desktops got wiped down with a damp cloth. I don't think being a film location's in our long-term plans. What we want for the future is more good content to keep the service fresh, with simultaneous release here as well as on DVD. More live interactive web-cam content -we currently have some cute cam-girls in Prague- and streamed TV channels. We're in talks with a couple of firms about that."
Given fair warning of impending photography, half the staff hid in the kitchen while we took a couple of photos of the office. Go Content isn't a porn business and, fair's fair, people working in IT don't necessarily want their picture in ETO. Jerry's mum is just pleased he's not an alcohol or tobacco baron, but they're spoken of in the same breath as what he does do. Our suggestion was he'd have been wise to say he was an arms dealer. That way when the truth inevitably came out (as it did to a nephew when he Googled Jerry's name and found his links to The Sexual Freedom Coalition and his work as an AITA board member) it would have been good news, not bad. Still, it's easy to be clever in retrospect.
Over a spot of late light lunch in one of Camden's many eateries, Barnett talked about some of the dips in Strictly Broadband's arc of success. There'd been a bit of licensing hoo-ha in the early days, which was solved by dealing with the studios directly. And last November's Erotica had left a rather sour taste, when Jerry had been threatened with ejection over the antics of some saucy actresses on his stand there. The only thing to appear faster than camera phones when boobs appeared (AJ's included, a photo we were shown proved. It's good to have staff who're keen to get involved) were security staff, bristling with righteous indignation.
"Equally annoying was being treated like a naughty kid by Christodoulou. As a well-paying exhibitor I don't expect to have to go nose-to-nose with the organiser in a stare-out competition. I'm not sure if we'll bother going back this year. We'll see closer to the time. I think we're coming to the ETO show in July though."
On that happy note we left Jerry to cycle the four miles home and AJ to rollerblade her way back to the tube. It's clear to us that while it's not right for everyone, Strictly Broadband's mixture of cutting-edge VOD technology, carefully formulated marketing and tempting affiliate programme guarantee their place in one market that's in no danger of getting any smaller in the foreseeable future.
Strictly Broadband
Phone 020 7267 5600
Fax 020 7681 3178
info@strictly/no-spam/broadband.com
7-9 Ferdinand Street, Chalk Farm, London, NW1 8ES.