Quote:
Originally Posted by Nautilus
Hi Robbie,
What solution did you use for encrypted streaming? Also, has it affected your rebills, and/or amount of repeated customers?
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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.