“BelAmi will take advantage of our global reach and expertise not only in online VOD, but mobile, cable and satellite broadcasting as well as emergent technologies,” said Eric Johnson, president of Sureflix Digital Distribution. The MaleFlixxx global network is owned and operated by SureFlix Digital Distributors, a leading global provider of adult gay programming.
“We see this as the next logical step in our growth,” said BelAmi. “Maleflixxx will provide their digital expertise in legal, marketing, business development and technology, and we can keep our focus on producing the world’s best content. Maleflixxx has a great team. They are very professional. We have confidence in knowing that there is a large team of digital specialists supporting us to find markets for our content."
MaleFlixxx Product Marketing Manager Mary Gillis feels there are challenges for content producers, gay or straight, in accessing various digital distribution channels.
“The Internet is a huge, diverse place,” Gillis told XBIZ. “There’s IPTV, linear, cable, satellite, digital distribution rights for Internet alone with everything else; internationally with contracts and arrangements, from country to country – how do you do all that when your core competency and what you’re good at is making content?”
Yet Gillis feels that the gay industry has been more eager than the straight industry, to pursue digital distribution formats.
“The Internet was a boon to the adult market in general. But gay men have historically been forced into alternative methods to pursue their lifestyle,” Gillis said. “They’ve been forced online, they’ve been forced from a very early age in the development of the Internet; for networking, for dating, for shopping, for everything. Even now, communities are allowing straight-oriented sex shops into their neighborhoods, but not gay-oriented sex shops. So, it’s made gay men early adapters and made the gay industry early adapters.”
Gillis says that all adult content producers should be considering strategies for digital distribution, which will become a significant factor in accessing larger global markets.
While many are already utilizing VOD to market their catalogs, she points out the myriad options available to producers and the difficulty in maximizing their ability to take advantage of different mediums.
“Even in VOD, there’s pay-per-view, pay-per-minute, pay-per-movie, downloads, streaming,” Gillis said. “There’s a lot of different ways to access in Internet VOD, but can you do it all? Are you going to glut the market? Are you going to parcel out your product, one by one by one, so that they go gradually through these different areas?”
She also advises producers to start thinking globally and to pay attention to emerging technologies in other parts of the world.
“North Americans can be a little bit insular and we run the risk of forgetting that what we’re doing here may be way ahead or way behind what other people are doing in other reaches of the world,” Gillis said. “A great example is mobile technology, which is not really important in North America right now. But in South America and Asia, there’s a huge market for mobile.”
As accessing growing distribution technologies becomes necessary for content producers and convergence becomes a reality, Gillis said partnerships like the one between BelAmi and MaleFlixxx will become more common.
“We don’t make content. We’re distributors. So our deal with Bel Ami is to say you do what you are so amazing at. And we’ll take the digital rights to your content and we’ll make sure that it goes through the entire product life cycle with every single digital channel available to us and make as much revenue as possible,” Gillis said.
