Hi Lagcam,
Thanks for taking the time to get back to me. It's 3am here - you're a work-a-holic like I am I guess (like we all are).
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Originally Posted by lagcam
OK, let me clarify this. It is not the software or any concerns about its capabilities that would prevent me from ever being your client, it is as Lazy cash said the "stipulations". You must host with us, you must do this and that blah blah blah.
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I see your point, but our stipulations weren't just made up. They came from experience and were hard decisions to make. Hosting with us for example, came about a long time ago. We would be blamed for slow, laggy video when the problem was due to a busy server or router at some hosting company. We were forced into doing tech support for their host, explaining how to trace and locate the source of the problem etc. Very expensive and time consuming.
By hosting it ourselves (we have cabinets at Peer1), we cut our support costs by 41%, provide faster service to our clients, and create a new source of revenue all at the same time.
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Originally Posted by lagcam
As front ends go, yours is great, and knowing how professional you are, and the fact that you have direct experience of running a site, (which many developers do not) I imagine that the back end could be one of the best I have seen also, although I haven't actually seen it.
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Thank you! And I would be happy to show you the new (v4.5) back end once it is installed (the old admin is kind of ugly).
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Originally Posted by lagcam
But the fact that you know about managing sites is also a problem because you STILL manage a site, and so you are actually a competitor to your own customers.......
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A very valid point, except that we actually do not compete with you, just the opposite. Please look at the MBASE (model database) feature on this page :
http://www.2much.net/mbase.php. It lets site owners license their live feeds out to other sites for re-sale. It's co-operation, not competition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lagcam
and what is also a little worrying is that as they are forced to host with you, you in theory have access to their data also....which could explain how you managed to catch the guy you said was stealing customers from you?
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Yes that is 100% correct. We do have the data, but it is not in our best interest to use it. What is in our best interest is to encourage you, a site owner, to grow your business. When you grow your business, we make more money (if you use mbase).
We try to be very transparent in how we do things. We wrote our software ourselves (except for the wowsa server we use for streaming). We use our software ourselves to video chat out of our own studio. We manage, hire, fire, advertise, test, experiment, change, modify, ourselves. Most importantly we share our successes and failures with our customers. We even post screenshots of our Google Analytics reports and encourage all of our customers to us GA on their own sites.
As for catching the guy who stole from us, we would have missed it completely had we not been alerted to it by other customers complaints. Once the accusations started to accumulate we simply matched the culprits to reports generated by LiveCamNetwork itself.
For example, one function of LiveCamNetwork lets you give money to any username. It can be used for testing, or to give money to a friend or anyone to video chat with a model. This counts as "real" money across the accounting system of course, and it is therefore logged for the site owner's own tracking purposes. The culprit never noticed that this link was a part of his admin program, which was one of the ways he was caught.
It's now 3:23am and I'm dead tired. Goodnight !