SAN FRANCISCO -- Gamelink.com and Adam & Eve this week teamed to launch AdamandEveTV.com, a membership site designed to showcase the best content from Adam & Eve Pictures as well as a full range of brand new erotica that has yet to be released.
The venture marks the next phase of what already has been a two-year collaboration between Gamelink, the video-on-demand giant, and Adam & Eve, one of the oldest and most respected studio brands in adult entertainment.
The new site comes on the heels of the success of AdamandEveVOD.com, the site that Gamelink began powering for Adam & Eve more than a year ago.
“We’ve been working with Adam & Eve to improve their VOD sales and we took over their VOD store and just had a huge increase in revenues,” Magnus Sullivan, who co-owns Gamelink with Ilan, told XBIZ.
“We’ve had a great deal of flexibility with the introduction of new features that for various reasons they weren’t able to make use of or develop on their own. So there have been several phases and that phase led us to extending to other areas of their digital online sales efforts.”
Sullivan said that when Adam & Eve General Manager Bob Christian next wanted to explore the idea of building a membership site that discussions led to creating something that broke the mold of traditional models.
“Our basic take was it’s pretty late in the game to fire up a membership site, so if you’re going to do it, you have to make it worth our while to build up the infrastructure and build an entirely new business,” Sullivan explained. “And we had to have a content strategy that made sense in today’s market. Most of the membership sites out there are members of massive traffic networks. It’s kind of the same traffic that’s being referred and recycled.”
Sullivan continued, “We felt they had to have something really compelling about their content, while not just trying to crack into the existing hardcore porn traffic. That’s what started an interesting conversation between us, asking questions like, ‘How do you do that? How do you do something new? What’s really the problem?’ That’s what led to the design of this website.”
The group said that AdamandEveTV.com was designed to appeal to a much broader audience.
“We wanted to reach out to a much more mainstream audience that’s interested in high-quality erotic content,” Sullivan said. “We wanted to reach out to women and couples, and that’s what informed our design.”
A large part of the AdamandEveTV.com rollout features dozens of the top story-driven productions from Adam & Eve’s diverse collection of movies. The site separates content into several genres, including romance, comedy, drama, fantasy, westerns and sex-ed. Adam & Eve parodies such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer XXX” and “Dallas XXX” also are available on AdamandEveTV.com.
“We launched with what we considered the best of the Adam & Eve library,” Ilan told XBIZ.
And the next phase of AdamandEveTV.com development already is in motion. That is to produce original, narrative erotic features in an effort to create “the HBO of adult content with multiple serial stories that are compelling, creative, sexy and different,” Sullivan said.
With that goal in mind, Sullivan and Ilan formed a new production company called LionReach that will produce high-quality narrative content for AdamandEveTV.com and other major distribution platforms.
“Ilan and I have a combined 42 years of online and adult experience. We have been encoding, marketing and distributing anywhere from 500 at our peak, to 250 new movies per week,” Sullivan said. “There is a tremendous amount of incredibly low quality content out there and we [as an industry] have been penalized for that.”
Sullivan said that because hardcore content used to be much more difficult to get that the standard for quality was sufficient.But those days are long gone.
“Once the content became easy to get, once mainstream outlets started moving in and increasing their erotic content, adult was no longer competing with itself. It’s competing with very high-quality mainstream content,” Sullivan reasoned.
“People just aren’t interested in what’s coming out now and that’s clear. The only competitive advantage we have is we can show penetration. That’s the only thing we’ve got on mainstream.”
So with LionReach, Sullivan and Ilan said they are working to aggressively raise the bar for narrative adult entertainment.
“That’s why this effort and this movie we’re working on is not just a movie, it’s an attempt to place adult content back into a relevant entertainment space,” Sullivan said. “Right now we are not a relevant entertainment source.”
The first LionReach movie, which has the working title of “Marriage 2.0,” features both adult and mainstream actors and crew. Production resumes this coming week in San Francisco for the film that stars India Summer, Nina Hartley, Ryan Driller from the adult side, among others.
“This story is the example of the kinds of stories that adult needs to start to address,” Sullivan said. “‘How do we have successful relationships? What role does sex play in our lives? How can we extend the role of sex in our lives and still have both stability and sexual novelty and personal growth?”
Sullivan hopes the themes of this movie and future LionReach productions become part of the national dialogue about sex.
After extensive research of mainstream erotica filmmakers, he and Ilan selected director Paul Deeb to work with adult industry veteran Alex Ladd on shooting “Marriage 2.0.” Sullivan said the vision for “Marriage 2.0” in part is to create a movie that not only shows what sex looks like, but also “what sex feels like” by giving the performers the opportunity to showcase talents that go beyond the sex act.
“We anticipate very wide distribution for this in September,” Ilan said.
Sullivan added, “We have people involved in this movie who are pretty big players in mainstream culture and it’s fascinating to me they are willing to be in this movie. … They also view these messages as important and they trust us to deliver the right message.”
The LionReach content model involves big-budget, feature-length productions, mid-level plot-driven movies, and a slate of recurring series.
“We want to be able to able to hit multiple content tiers that allow us to produce up to a scene a week. That’s our goal within six months,” Sullivan said.
“I’m extremely excited. I think we’re redefining content models for the adult industry, elevating the bar, injecting the industry into a much broader market and raising expectations.
“People are going to see what adult performances can deliver. It’s beautiful. It’s artistic. It’s sexy and the lines are delivered with passion. I think we’re on the verge of really saving content in adult, which has fallen off the cliff in the past 10 years. Nobody’s really been able to come up with a clear model that’s extremely relevant. We’ve got distribution. We’ve got experience and we’ve got a brand name with Adam & Eve.”
