This is just the perfect time for sponsors to turn on the shave-o-meter and blame it on our economic status, tubes and torrents. :2 cents:

too sad that you really think that. It is so easy to protect yourself and test programs that if you really think that it is your own fault for sending them traffic. That is just an excuse lazy webmasters use :2 cents:

[QUOTE=Brian837;14982055why do so many people act like it is one thing? How about a little bit of everything. All this shit adds up and for some reason people list ten things and ask which one is the reason for the problems LOL[/QUOTE]

I don't think people are trying to say it's necessarily a single thing. I think people are smart enough (I would HOPE) to realize it's the combination of numerous factors. Some more so than others which is why you see people saying it's "tube sites", "it's the economy", "it's torrents", etc.

Now that doesn't make much sense to me. By that logic, any new technology or method of delivery that becomes wildly popular and it's what the consumer wants, you're willing to forgo having it? People may not know what Flash is, but if you told them that's the technology behind the videos they watch on YouTube, MySpace, etc, then they would be like "oh..that!".

As many people have stated, you need to stay ahead of the curve or at least catch it to stay competitive be it with technology, the content itself, or both.

hmmmm...perhaps, but to me issue with storing files is largely a non issue now with the price of portable hard drives, flash drives, etc being so cheap.

The issue with the subscription model, as it is now, is it has spoiled the consumer. The porn consumer expects to pay a low monthly fee and have access to tons of content. What other industry continues to do this? You join a gym for a monthly fee, but if you want access to a personal trainer or something else one-on-one, that's extra money.

You join NetFlix for a monthly fee, but they limit the number of movies you can have and you don't own the movie, You still have to return it or buy it.

You go to an all you can eat buffet, but not everything is on the menu. The buffet only includes selected items. Want something not included, it's extra.

You join Rhapsody (sorry, hate itunes), you pay a monthly fee to stream as much music as you want. But as soon as I want to take the music somewhere I have to pay for it.

I'm sorry, but you don't see Capital Records (for example) having their entire catalog available for a monthly fee and allow customers do whatever they want with the music.

Think about this, AC/DC is STILL making money from Back in Black which was released over 20 years ago. With a subscription model instead of making $1 per sale (just picking a number) they only make .00001 cents.

The currrent subscription model dilutes your return on your investment.

I agree to an extent. It seems to me this assumption is based on having that content still available within a subscription site. I would imagine the majority of consumers would think "gee, I pay $5 for this one video or pay $20 and get that video and hundreds of others".

You could hide the fact the video is available in the subscription site, but since you're using the VOD as an upsell to your membership site (I assume), the person will likely join the membership site instead. Now you just made pennies on that video instead of dollars.

I'm not necessarily advocating the elimination of the current subscription model. I'm suggesting it needs to be modified and used in conjuction with the VOD model. For example, for the subscription site you have set amount of content available at any given time. Old content is pulled off the subscription site and put on the VOD site. Doing this would allow you to extend the "life" of the content while getting a higher return on your investment.

I know I've focused on the subscription model so don't think I believe that is the sole issue with what's going on within the industry. I don't. It's just one of many.

Happy Halloween everyone!!!

first sit and think why they need their own merchant account and then you will have the answer to your question.

I have my own merchant account for my pay per view site and am not implying that your own merchant account = shady but figure it out.

I think we as tech savy folks underestimate this. Becuase really i am not that tech savy i have found tubes and like them just like a surfer would. They make it so easy. If you can use youtube, you can use a tube. I think we might actually see torrents get hurt by tubes. The higher quality might not be worth the hassle in the long run for some people. I have been in members areas of some of the biggest and best paysites and for me it does come close to a tube site.

I don't know about that....A lot of people can't watch a scene more than once or twice, myself included...They always will need something new and fresh and as long as you keep bringing it, you'll eat...

I know that no matter what, I'll keep bringing new hoes...These hoes are the reason my youngest kid is watching Go Diego Go and eating an ice cream sandwich....A hoe had to get a surfer horny in order for that to happen......PUSSY paid for that ice cream sandwich.

you are 100% right when it comes to regular porn, but with niche porn the surfer likes something very specific and they will watch the same clip over and over.

This is not what I think but rather fact as I see on my pay per view site people coming back reordering the same spanking clip or other fetish clip many times (no aff program on that guys so dont think im spamming)

I do not think it did. If you have quality original stuff, if only 20 vids, you'll do just fine in today's market, both sales are rebills wise. Surfers are not going to go to another site only because it promised more. They expect to get off and that's it. If your 20 vids get the job done, you'll do just fine both sales and rebills wise.

Other industries are the whole different story. Sure you need to pay extra for your personal gym trainer, but how is it any different from paying extra for personal one-on-one cam show with the model you like? And gym is not charging you extra for every device you exercise with.

As to the music and movie industries, last time I heard their sales are declining. Doesn't that sound like a flawed business model?

And I do not think piracy is the main reason - the main reason is that they do not seem to grasp that in today's market you cannot charge $1 per song or $10 per video, if you sell them online. There's only so much you can sqeeze from a customer. If your content library is worth $2 million in retail price, that doen't mean you have many buyers at that price. Average Joe will still spend $50-100 he can afford to spend on entertaiment.

I'm pretty sure big studios would get millions of $20 recurring customers if they allowed access to their entire content libraries. But they're still chasing every single buck they can possibly sqeeze from a customer, while loosing billions in between.

VOD only sounds as if it might get you much more money than subscription based model. In some cases it really will, but in most cases it will not. While there're surely junkies who'll spend thousands on your stuff through the VOD option, average Joe will not.

VOD is a niche payment option - very good option actually that might increase your bottomline in managed properly. But still niche option, for very specific audience. But it is mainstream in mainstream, that's why I think they're fucked even more than we are.

Great idea, thanks for sharing. I think it might work, at least for us.

Really? Show me a successful site that only has 20 videos available at any given moment that doesn't give you access to bonus sites. Believe me, I'd love to get away with that! You may be able to start with 20 videos, but you better plan on weekly updates at a minimum to keep people around.

Remember when Napster got shut down? Everyone was whining and complaining because they had gotten spoiled by having unlimited and free access to all the music they wanted. Yeah, that is more about piracy. I'm just using that as an example of a spoiled consumer base. And that's what we have with porn. Not only are we selling content for pennies, we're giving away sooooooooo much of it just trying to get people to become a member. Now there's this HUGE pile of FREE porn out there and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger (yet another issue).

Exactly, why not make premium content an extra cost? Instead sites continue to put more and more and more content, add more features, give access to more bonus sites, all while keeping the monthly membership the same. Oh wait....maybe because the porn customer is completely spoiled and if the price goes up $5 a month they quit :winkwink:

Not true. Warner Brothers claims a loss of $17 million loss in the 3rd quarter, BUT Digital revenue GAINED 29%, accounting for 15% of total sales compared to 11% last year.

CD sales may be down, but digital music is on the rise

As for movies, box office revenue has risen from $7.5 billion in 2000 to $9.66 billion in 2007.

Ok..so we could rattle of stats till our faces turned blue :1orglaugh

Still, as I said, this is, to me, part of the larger problem.

Thanks! Liking the healthy debate. Hopefully it will generate ideas and solutions.

dire predictions from some people...
http://www.hostchecker.info/image5.jpg

Great post EB, lots of identification of the problems with the current market / economy. Now let's figure out a few fixes ;)
WG

I was going to mention weekly updates but forgot. Sure, you're absolutely right, at least weekly updates are a must if you're going to stay around and not get burned within 2-3 months.

What I was going to say is that even 20 good videos is enough for starter, even today with all of them huge megasites around and even worse tubes. "Spoiled consumers" are not going to be a problem for you starting with your new site. They never will be a problem, actually, except maybe for sites that specifically market amount of content they have. But for sites that market specific types of content, there's no difference in sales between 20 vids+weekly updates or 2000vids + weekly updates sites. 20 vids sites would often sell even better, if they're new production with fresh stuff.

We're not selling it for pennies. $30-40 is not that cheap at all. You can regret you're not getting $5 you want for every video you sell, and even more so when you have huge 2000+ content library you're selling for the same $30-40, but again, be reasonable. Customers do not have unlimited budgets, they're not going to pay you $10K for your entire collection. Even $100-200 will be a tough nut to shell.

Well that's normal, as time goes by customers want more for the same amount of money. Average computer is still worth about $1000, but modern computers are 100x more powerful than those that were sold 20 years ago. Does that mean manufactures should charge $100K for them? I do not think so.

Loss is the keyword. They gained online, but not enough to make up for their losses elsewhere. Why haven't they made enough from their online sales? Obviously because their business model is flawed. If they offered their entire library plus updates for $20-30/month, and opened up an affiliate program, they'd have 10 million members in no time - and that's 2 billion of found money in just one year. And they still have box office, DVD/CD sales, TV rights etc etc. Demand is there, they just do not see it, or keep dreaming about charging customers with crazy amount of money they never going to pay.

How do you figure? Say you have 20 videos. Your membership is $20/mo. You just sold that video for $1. The more videos you have, the less their individual value.

I do hear what you're saying about consumers not having unlimited budgets and I get that. But, why should they get sooooooo much for such a small monthly fee?

LOL..I'm not saying they should pay that. Good point though. But, the cost of production remains the same, hence the little difference in price for a better product. BUT, if I want more memory, a faster processor, a better graphics card, the price goes up. What I"m trying to say, is at a certain point extra, bleeding edge, benefits should cost more. Overtime the cost of those additional benefits will drop and you make them part of the monthly fee, but they would be replaced by the next wave of benefits. Just like a computer or a car.

Loss...not necessarily. How about profit margin? As soon as you implement a subscription model your profit margin decreases and continues to decrease with every new song/movie you add. Sure you hope to offset that by selling more subscriptions, but at some point that growth is going to level off or become minimal. Then what? In the long run the subscription model's profitability declines. I definitely don't see their business model as flawed. Just different and in my opinion, more profitable.

Regardless, the subscription model is probably always going to be the primary model in this industry unless there's some huge issue that causes a change. And I certainly don't think the movie/music industry will ever embrace a subscription model. Who knows!:winkwink:

ah...I think we've just about beat this into a pulp. I would love to hear some other opinions, but it's time for me to get my drink on and watch the Halloween shit show!

Have a fun and safe Halloween

I don't understand how you can protect the well shot video any more than the blond getting shafted video. They are both just videos. Just because a surfer "appreciates" a scene more does not mean he respects it, and is not going to share it or tube it or torrent it.

Boring run of the mill content sucks, but it is just a small portion of the big problem

You are right for the most part, but I actually have engaged some surfers who are fans of my lesbian movies on certain fan forums including some obscure ones where they trade plenty of videos back and forth and, because of my involvement, the moderator has willfully prevented the group from putting their favorite videos of mine up on rapidshare or torrents at least amongst that group. I actually turned some of them into customers by taking a proactive approach to customer relations.

Interesting. Can't say I've ever thought about people's bigger hard drives meaning less need to buy more porn...

Tony, I get those emails all the time...minus the "gotten fucked so hard by some site" part. I get at least one or two emails per week wanting to know if they can join by money order.

I always tell them "No" that is not an option. And I would suggest you do the same thing.

I can see it now...you sell a membership to some 12 year old via money order and then it's off to jail. Don't do it.

And by the way, this is a good thread. I'm sorry to hear that the industry is in such bad shape. I personally went ahead and bit the bullet several months back and the Claudia-Marie members area is all encrypted streaming.

Had a small percentage of people bitch about it (probably the same fucking assholes who were uploading our shit to every torrent and tube on the web). Haven't had a single new scene show up anywhere since we went to encrypted streaming. There are still a few of the old scenes that were originally released on .wmv floating about. But removeyourcontent.com keeps that down pretty well.

Soooo...I just sold my home (that was completely paid for) in South Carolina and bought a new million dollar home here in Las Vegas. I work hard, I play hard, and I make a lot of money. Yeah, the economy sucks. But the comment that torrents have been around a while isn't exactly true.

They've been around a couple of years. Tubes blew up a little over a year ago. It all coincided with declining sales. As an affiliate for over 10 years with hundreds of companies...I see the sales dropping fast for the generic "mega-sites"

You can't keep shooting those same 20 girls fucking those same 10 guys all from LA Direct and make sales when those same people are all over the tube sites in every possible scenario and position.

If I want to see Sara Jay fuck a couple of black guys (and I do), I don't have to pay to see it. Same with all the other girls.

My feeling is that content is going to have to be protected. I saw my sales going down on Claudia-Marie.Com...not much, but ANY decline scares the hell out of me. And when I put up a scene on a Tuesday, then find it all over the tubes and torrents by Wednesday afternoon (along with the rest of the members area), I knew something had to be done. And I did it.

It was scary at first. I thought all my members would get pissed and quit when they couldn't download. But I went for it anyway. And after a couple of white knuckle weeks...it turned around.

Now I only wish that all the programs I push as an affiliate on my free sites would do the same thing so I could start making sales as an affiliate again too.

Hi Robbie,

What solution did you use for encrypted streaming? Also, has it affected your rebills, and/or amount of repeated customers?

I keep reading this about Tubes and I keep saying the same thing.

If your site does not compete with Tubes that's your fault.

Tubes are not going to go away. You need to learn to compete with them. If your porn and site at $1 a day is not competing with a Tube site you need to make sure it does and stop worrying about Tubes or dreaming they will go away.

Great post. Yes we have all the experts on what members want and with all this fantastic knowledge we are losing out to Tube sites. :upsidedow

We have experts on how to get people to a site, how to direct them and some have some knowledge on how to convert them. Very few have a clue about porn and what the members want. If they do they are one of the few sites making money.

GFY is a good place for fart jokes. :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

You don't get what I'm saying. You can't stop people, probably the Tube site itself, from stealing. You can send them a DMCA and get them to take it down. So if your porn is a cut above the rest like Party Hardcore the surfer has to join if he wants that porn. If your exclusive porn is like 90% of the other exclusive porn in the niche then he just looks at another scene by another sponsor. Your content has to be different and good to make it worth protecting. And yes it will still get stolen and you will still need to get it removed. Most Tubes will in my experience. And it's not a 100% solution.

Hope I explained it well enough this time.

Robbie said how to do it in his post. Great post as well.

This is one of the few things this thread has. This thread and all the other Tube threads.

Great post. Thanks.

Or if you just want to see any blond fucking any guy on a sofa. And that's what so many do not get. They grew rich when the consumer had to buy to view porn and now the consumer does not have to buy to view general porn, even exclusive, they're screwed. This applies to the DVD industry as well.

But the moment I talk to a sponsor about producing content he's telling me some guy in Russia will shoot it cheaper or the idea I have to make the content unique is making it too expensive. Recently spoke to a well known sponsor and told him I could shoot unique scenes in a good niche and it would cost 1,000 Euros a hardcore scene down to 500 Euros a solo girl scene. He told me to he can buy HC scenes for $600 and solo for $250. I bet they would be unique. </sarcasm>

Just thinking about the number of members who fill their hard drives with porn scenes. How many members would it take doing this before the BW and hardware costs started to be a problem? Also how many guys are single and have no problem with a home computer full of porn? I doubt if this is a big problem. I have loads of members just looking at scenes on the site because they don't want the wife and kids to see it.

I don't agree with you, people like to see new things all the time. I have 300 dvd's here, I never watched them twice. Someone should come up with a real pole and ask surfers why they are not buying porn?

answer will be: why pay when we get it for free, that simple lol. Yes, if a surfer looks at a movie gallery, he will probably see if he could find it on a tube or a torrent & if he cant find it he will probably join that paysite.

Because I'm not counting individual values, just the amount of money we get from one customer, and our bottomline.

Well not necessary they should. Although I'm debating with you about advantages of all included monthly subscriptions, we ourselves are selling extras for the extra price :) Have been doing it for years, and doing pretty well. We upsell our own sites from member zones, and sell access to our entire network for $84.95. That adds up about 25% to our bottomline. Also I'm thinking about your idea about removing archives and upselling them for yet another extra price. I think that might add yet another 10-20% to our bottomline, if done properly.

I'm pretty sure they're counting profit margins per individual titles, and happy with what they see. And then they report loss. To me that sounds like something is wrong with their approach to doing business online.

Profitability per title is theory, profitability of your entire company is reality. If they can get 10 million members to their content library at $20, their overall profitability would skyrocket. But they went another route - selling individual titles through third party providers, which is wrong in my opinion. iTunes and the likes should be sources of the additional income, like clips4sales and similar site for us, but main income should come from their own site(s). That's why I think they're making like 20% of what they could online, and report losses. Because they use only additional income sources totally ignoring what should be their main focus.

I certainly agree with that :)

Agreed. I have a thousand DVDs, most good films made on real budgets by people who know what they're doing. Very few have I watched more than once. Porn is even more disposable.

Then we have to make it worth his while to join.

Charge him by the day, at a price he will pay, plus better speed and quality image, maybe have a live web cam girl or girls inside the site to chat to members and put on free shows. All this can be done and we are at fault for not doing it. Just one thing stops us.

Could a site with 100 members joining a day afford it?

100 x $30 = $3,000 a day.

Less 15% processing, 10% server, 10% office admin and 10% content. Leaves 55% or $1650 a day. And yes my figures are probably over the top. So this site could afford to give the members a much better deal. Now why don't we?

You got it. we spend 60% of our turnover, as an industry, getting surfers to the tour. :upsidedow

OK my figures are guessing and general. But they illustrate the biggest problem, we value the guy passing through more than the guy stopping and buying. We must value him more because we spend more time and money on him.

I'm using Adobe Flash Server. Converted all vids to h264 They stream rtmpe encrypted streaming.

Google it up and do some reading on it. The software cost a grand, and I have a guy on staff who takes care of my servers, so we compiled the neccessary system requirements and installed it ourselves.

After that, the only cost was in the man hours I personally spent re-encoding and uploading the members area to change all the old ones over.

I turned that into a silver lining by convincing my wife that it was finally time to spend 11 grand on my new Dell T7400 Dual XEON x5482 3.2 gig quadcore processors running 64 bit with 16 gigs of RAM. Heh-heh. Took me about one day to re-encode everything. (even the new ones as I came up with some new settings for h264 which got me much smaller file sizes and much faster streaming)

I always try to turn any adversity into an excuse for a new toy. :)

As for members...yes, it was very scary at first. I lost 20 or so members real fast and it scared the shit out of me. But then that stopped. Now I get about the same amounts of sales and rebills as I did before I started losing sales to tubes and torrents. Which makes me very happy!

I still have a couple of members who joined the first week we opened Claudia-Marie.com And that was the last coupld of days of April 2007. And I have plenty of members that joined in the rest of 2007 as well. So it definitely didn't drive away the faithful at all.

I also offer a VOD section which allows people who don't want to have a membership to download individual scenes for 10 bucks each. I use phantomflicks.com for that. Affiliates get credited for sales to that as well since I encoded the link from the tour page to follow their NATS code. I only offer the older vids from before I started the encrypted streaming.

So some of the older stuff still ends up on tubes and torrents. But I have removeyourcontent.com taking those down as well.

It's a pretty good one-two punch.

In my humble opinion, if you are shooting exclusive content...or even buying it....and you want to make sales then you must protect your stuff. The paysite model DEFINITELY works then. :) But I will admit, it took a lot of balls and sleepless nights to go this route. I knew that something had to be done, but it was uncharted waters for me and if I had been wrong it could have ruined me.

That's why more people have not went this route yet. But if and when they do, it will result in more sales/rebills for everyone. It's just a hard business decision to make when there are millions of dollars at stake.

props to ya robbie!

I'd just like to see the tubes and torrents stopped. It obviously isn't happening fast enough legally. So I wish that more paysites were protecting their content. Yeah, I'm doing great with my paysite. But my freesite business was my bread and butter since 1998. Now it's on life support. Thank God I always did revshare. Because trying to make sales to some of the big sites these days is like pulling teeth.

If my affiliate sales to other companies were at the levels they once were, and I was making this paysite money at the same time....I would be filthy fucking rich and a total asshole. lol :1orglaugh

Okay, I'm already a total asshole....but you know what I mean :)

I'm going to DRM after reading this thread all week. Thanks everyone!

Good post. We have to adapt to these changes. Bigger hard drives and faster connection speeds? So we can sell HD movies. Tubes and torrents? We must sell exclusive content in specific niches.

Thanks for explanations Robbie. I have couple more questions, if you don't mind.

What bitrate and resolution did you use? Has it affected your bandwidth usage?

I'm especially interested to know if this works OK with HD.

Do you already have any particular DRM solution in mind?

I think the tube sites are one massive problem, Why pay for porn? It's crazy ass free these days.

That said i'm sure somebody will have the next big idea and become the next big thing.

I remember back some years ago when all the posts on the board were about how the adult Internet industry was dead, and then what happened? Bang bus and MILF Hunter came out and immediately made those guys rich and a household names. (I guess they didn't get the memo!!!!)
The question is: Who will it be? And will it be you or me?

Eventually someones gonna make a shit load of money on real estate because of this big ass crash too. It all goes around.

Im still in SD...but the h264 compression ESPECIALLY works good for HD. Matter of fact, in HD it will give you files far, far smaller than you've ever had before.

As far as bandwidth...I haven't had any real changes in that. For Claudia-Marie.Com I have a 15 TB a month package and I usually fall anywhere from 11 to 13 TB a month.

Most of the bandwidth is from the tour and galleries anyway. The members area isn't really even a factor in the bandwidth.

I am going to go HD sometime this next year and can't wait. Matter of fact, the first time I ever saw h264 streaming was with HD movie trailers put out by the big Hollywood studios. They are absolutely awesome looking. I've seen some HD h264's encoded at 500k that looked damn near flawless.

I can't come close to doing that...probably because I'm shooting in SD. My uneducated theory would be that if you shoot in HD you can compress it down further with better results because your original file size is so big.

I am currently encoding h264 .mp4's at 1,200k At first I was doing them at a variable rate of 2 - 6 mps But the stream puts a big load on the user side cpu. So any of my members using a weak computer and/or a computer with a shitload of background tasks were having problems with the stream "stuttering" on them.

Plus those file sizes were pretty big...but damn they looked sooo good. I re-encoded all of them to the 1,200kps and that pretty much ended any problems. Not quite as "perfect" as the bigger ones were...but nobody is having any problems now at all.

From what I have been told by others who are shooting porn in HD, that 1,200 kps encode rate should look like a million bucks with HD. :) I would say this is the "future". But the reality is...for mainstream Hollywood it is the "present".

It's a scary step to make though. The thought of possibly pissing off your entire members section is enough to make someone pause.

I have a section in my members area entitled: WHY CAN'T I DOWNLOAD THE VIDEOS

Here is the copy&paste:

"WHY CAN'T I DOWNLOAD THE VIDEOS?
For many years adult sites were set up to allow their members to download the videos. No problem. But in the last 2 years people have begun downloading them and then re-uploading them to so-called "free" sites. Seemed cool. But what you didn't know was those "free" sites are making MILLIONS of dollars off of pre-paid spots from "dating" sites because they have such huge traffic numbers of surfers wanting to watch "free" porn.
But the real result is, it's putting the people who actually CREATE porn out of business. We could no longer stand by and see this happen to us. It was so bad that we would release a new update intended for YOU. And within hours it was all over the internet on every thief's site. And those motherfuckers are making money off of us! And using our own members against us to make them money at our expense.
But for months we have been at an impasse. I wanted to protect our content and the value of your membership, but I didn't want to lose any quality.
Well, in the last few months brand new mpeg streaming technology has come out which allows large files to begin to stream almost instantaneously AND allows the surfer to click anywhere on the timeline of the vid and skip right to that part.
It cost us quite a bit of money to have this brand new encrypted streaming server installed on our server. But we shelled out the money. And we have been working night and day to encode all the vids by hand...not using some bullshit script, but carefully making sure each vid is of the highest quality.
We thank you for being a member, and we are working hard to ensure that your membership is a great value to have for years to come.
The content on Claudia-Marie is unlike any other in the world. It isn't some generic porn being shot in "porn valley" by "porn stars". Claudia-Marie is a REAL milf and true sexual being. She doesn't "fake it" like those girls do in L.A. This is the real deal. And her content is a very precious commodity when compared to all the generic porn out there. And we intend on keeping it that way. We not only are using encrypted streaming...but we have hired a company that is aggressively sending legal notices and having all of the stolen vids of Claudia-Marie taken down.
Yes, it is costing us a lot of money. But we truly want your membership to be something special and unique. Our members are like family to us and we appreciate each and every one of you. We have BIG plans and are very busy shooting some of the best footage we have ever done. Just let me know if there's anything you need.
thanks,
-Robbie

INSTRUCTIONS TO PLAY VIDS:
1. You will need FLASH in order to stream the vids. Get that HERE

2. You will see a large image on the page. That is where the vid will be displayed. Push the play button.

3. The video will begin to play within a few seconds.

4. Once the vid starts to play you can grab the cursor and yank it forward or backward in the timeline of the movie and skip parts or watch your favorite parts over and over.

5. Make sure to not squirt cum all over your computer keyboard... lol"

Oh, you also asked about resolution.
That's an important one for SD. Not so much for HD.

I shoot at 720 x 480 standard resolution.

So I was encoding the streaming vids at that resolution. But they were looking funny to me. They almost looked "squashed" like when you watch a 4:3 movie stretched out on a 16:9 screen...everybody looks short and squat.

I searched and searched...and it turns out that pixels on a monitor are square. So to stream "correctly" you have to use 640 x 480 for SD! Once I did that...it was perfect.

Now for HD, I would assume you would bring it down to a resolution that would fit most screens. I fooled around shooting in HD a few months ago and when I put the movie up onscreen it was GIGANTIC! lol

It was like one nostril filling up my entire monitor. So I obviously don't know shit about HD yet.

Robbie, that was great read. When I start my site, I plan on going a similar route. I'm doing ultra high quality 3D animation, so I think it'll be unique, even though there plenty of 3D on the web already. It's really something special and I've been working on it for years.

I keep thinking that the best way to keep your copyrighted materials from flooding the torrents as complete site rips is to NOT allow the customer to just sign up for 30 bucks and let them download everything. I'm going to carte blanche, and do my best to track down the stray clip that's been posted to Rapidshare and torrents. I know that I'm probably not even close to knowing what a nightmare it will be, but I think your route is the best way to keep high volumes of your stuff from being ripped off.

The internet is like a giant JC Penny with the front door wide open and no security(bad analogy, I know). It's even worse on the internet....when people know they're anonymous, it brings out the worst in them. They might not run into that JC Penney and grab a pile of stuff and run, but they'll surely steal some porn and have no problem. I've done it, and many of us have, even if they don't admit it. It makes sense to protect your hard work in the best way possible.

useful information - so you're cropping videos shot at 720x480?