The five panelists who addressed conference attendees in the friendly confines of the Cinegrill multimedia room inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel were Jonathan Silverstein of TheContentStore.com, Jason Tucker of Falcon Foto, Chad Knowles of SecurePath Technology, Jeff Mullen of All Media Play and X-Play while Mike Hawk from Smashbucks moderated the discussion.
Ensuring your content’s security was the first topic at hand. All panelists agreed the first thing a content producer should do is register a copyright for all content before it is published. This way, a producer has a legal recourse against infringers.
All agreed that the simplest and cheapest method to protect content is through a watermark, so if the video or photo gets posted on the Internet or shared via a file sharing network, the content producer can at least expect some clicks back to his website. Watermarking is a powerful form of branding, Tucker of Falcon Foto said.
Silverstein of TheContentStore.com suggested that all content producers with video footage on the web encode in Adobe FlashPlayer because of its security features. Encoding in Flash makes is harder for pirates to hack, download and share content.
Last year, Tucker and his company dedicated a lot of time to documenting “widespread abuse of our images,” he said. The company designed a special proprietary software program equipped with a digital recognition component that scans the entire Internet for Falcon Foto content.
According to Tucker, the company documented thousands of instances of infringement and filed four federal lawsuits, most prominently against Porn Kings and Guerilla Traffic.
Departing from security issues, the panel spoke about licensing content on different platforms including licensing for members areas, video-on-demand, pay-per-view and adult broadcast networks.
Speaking from his position as a director for Hustler Video, Adam & Eve and others, Mullen of X-Play wanted his content on as many different platforms as possible, but opined that payouts were way to low for his liking.
“I feel in some ways we are being led to the slaughterhouse,” Mullen said. “Payouts suck, period. New releases that go up on the web should not be making pennies on the dollar. I think this is a new era of content production and we just shouldn’t be giving our content away for next to nothing.”
But, with traditional DVD sales slagging, Mullen said it was necessary to “spread content around to as many different platforms as possible.” With this philosophy, other nontraditional avenues for content delivery like PPV, VOD, download-to-burn and monthly membership sites could make up for declining revenue on the DVD side.
Hawk commented that this meeting between content producers and webmasters was groundbreaking because there was a lot of mistrust between both parties. Hawk recently completed a deal to take the library of Caballero online via paysites through Smashbucks. He said the deal took more than two years to be completed because of trust issues.
According to Mullen, the “old school porn guys” need to embrace the web and new technology in order to stay relevant — and profitable.
“I think we could all dispel the rumor that Internet guys are thieves and scam artists and that the studio guys are mobbed up,” Tucker said. “We all need to embrace the net and work together for better ends.”