Scott Coffman, founder and CEO of AEBN, the world’s largest paid video-on-demand company, was featured in an ABC News Nightline report [www.abcnews.go.com/Nightline/porn-industry-struggles-free-content-piracy/story?id=9795710&page=3] on economic issues facing the adult entertainment industry such as free content and piracy.
It also focused on RealTouch, a next generation product that Coffman says creates a piracy-proof entertainment experience and is a complement to AEBN, which streams over a million hours of online VOD every month.
ABC said new media formats such as the Internet, which helped grow the adult video business into a billion dollar industry, is now also its biggest threat because DVD and digitized videos can be copied and put up for free on YouTube-like sites known as Tubes.
Most Tube sites are run on a bad business model says Coffman, the successful entrepreneur who started one of the first and largest ones with PornoTube.com, which is a profitable generator of traffic for AEBN’s core business of paid VOD through an extensive network of AEBN affiliates and sites like MovieMonster.com.
While PornoTube is careful about verifying the rights to the videos it displays, other Tube sites are not as diligent.
“We realized quickly that the user-generated content model could get out of hand. When people didn’t have their own content, they just grabbed someone else’s video,” says Coffman.
What really excites Coffman about the future of adult video entertainment is RealTouch, which was recently named Innovative Product of the Year by industry trade magazine XBiz. RealTouch combines a proprietary haptic device with specially encoded online video that integrates sight, sound and touch to create a uniquely immersive experience.
“While Hollywood is still trying to perfect 3-D with movies like Avatar, we’ve leapfrogged that by delivering the sensory dimension of touch. RealTouch is the first device that can let a man actually feel and experience the action he’s watching in a video.” Plus, he says, RealTouch is a revolutionary consumer product that not so much ends piracy as it renders it irrelevant.
How does RealTouch combat piracy? Simple says Coffman, “You can pirate the movie but you can’t pirate the experience. It would be like trying to steal a roller coaster.”