SANTA MONICA, Calif. – A new online video venture aspires to provide consumers with a Netflix- or Hulu-like experience while offering adult content producers another outlet for their explicit wares.
Skweez Media unveiled SkweezMe.com during the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas late last week. The site presents licensed, full-length adult titles in an unlimited-streaming-per-day format, on multiple platforms, at a price Executive Vice President of Content Marketing Mike Kulich called “more comparable to current mainstream viewing habits.”
Kulich said his company hopes to change attitudes both inside and outside the industry with the site.
“Skweez Media is revolutionizing how content owners, including studios, offer their product via online video services,” he averred. “With the decline of DVD and pay-site revenue due to factors including tube sites and content piracy, we offer our platform to our licensees as a way to monetize their content that is unlike any of the [other video-on-demand] services out there. It will better protect content ownership, and provide a new way for consumers to stream quality adult content at a price point more in line with the fast growing technology-based market.”
According to Skweez Media President Jamey Kirby, consumers have grown increasingly dissatisfied with both the recurring monthly billing model employed by most pay sites and the per-minute billing employed by VOD providers. Switching to a plan that more closely resembles mainstream e-commerce will set them at ease, he believes.
“Recurring billing is a marketer’s dream, but it can be a consumer’s nightmare,” he told CNBC correspondent Chris Morris.
Content owners are paid on a revenue-share basis: 25 percent of the income their products generate. Kulich indicated the split is a good deal for producers, considering SkweezMe projects a potential audience of 100 million viewers in an era when both digital piracy and flagging DVD sales have taken big bites out of most studios’ profits.
“We don’t expect to be able to recuperate the $4 billion the industry loses each year to piracy,” Kulich told CNBC’s Morris, “but it would be nice if we could recuperate a portion of it.”
