Christian on his website, www.christiansingstheblues.com talks about a conversation he had at Venus Berlin with Lexington Steele and Chris Norman. The following is part of that.

Christian: Our table… discussed the huge problems that DVD companies have when trying to convert to the internet age which is now taking over our business.

They are having difficulty gaining a foothold on the internet for two reasons. The first reason is that as recent as last January, the DVD companies were treating the Internet companies as the enemy, AVN included. They almost completely shut them out of the AVN awards process. And so, many Internet-savvy companies are basically giving the middle finger to the DVD companies, who are now coming to them for help making money.

The problem with DVD companies converting to internet sites is this. Let’s take a fictitious DVD company and call it LA Valley Porno Inc. That company has been putting out DVD’s for a long time, and so they have built up quite a library that spans over 5 years or so. And now LA Valley Porno wants to start some websites.

So they buy WWW Dot LA Valley Porn Dot Com and maybe 4-5 other sites. Well now they have to dump their entire library into that site WHEN they LAUNCH it. In reality, a website only needs 10-12 scenes for a launch. Then you start updating it once a week. So the extra 150 scenes in addition to the 12 needed to launch a site are basically worthless. LA Valley Porno can’t release those scenes as updates……because the scenes aren’t new. I can’t release a scene with Naomi as an update, because she disappeared almost two years ago. Consumers aren’t stupid, they can tell when someone tries to bamboozle them.

So now, LA Valley Porno has to shoot new scenes at least once a week and spend the money on the new scenes, and then hope the website that they launched begins making money. This is a problem, because in order to do that, you are going to be losing money for a while, until your site catches on with customers and rebills start mixing in with new sales. Many DVD companies and directors are unwilling to lose money at the beginning of the process, because they are used to making money or some of them don’t have the reserves to absorb the initial losses.

Sound like a problem? Fuck yeah it is. The longer tenured DVD companies basically now have tons of worthless scenes as far as the Internet is concerned. I am sure there are solutions that smarter people than me have figured out, but in my mind, the only short term solution is to sell the rights to specific scenes to internet companies at a price. For example, I have a scene with Belladonna in it, and I sell that scene and the model releases to Belladonna and her website for a price.