"Sexual Renaissance Man" -- this term neatly encapsulates Erik Schannen, founder/CTO of Sureflix. AVN Online readers likely know his company better by its Maleflixxx brand. Since 2001, Maleflixxx has been offering high-resolution streamed gay porn on the Web. The company has also launched its own gay porn TV channel -- Maleflixxx Television -- in Canada.
Sitting in his airy Toronto office in a renovated 19th-century building, Schannen is a bit bemused by Sureflix's success, built as it is upon a video platform that he originally designed for fun.
"Back in 1996, I had produced an interactive fitness CD-ROM," he tells AVN Online. "It was somewhat revolutionary for the time, in that the viewer's choices steered the video segments shown so that the instructors appeared to be speaking directly to the viewer's personal fitness needs." Having profited handsomely from that project, Schannen "took a couple of years off" and played around with a personal project, namely a high-quality system for streaming video over the Web.
At the time, video streaming was a pretty dismal affair. Limited bandwidth combined with inadequate server space on the part of most providers resulted in stamp-sized video feeds that were often jerky and hard to watch. "I could see what the solution was, but I knew that it would take a while for the Internet to catch up to it," says Schannen. "So I got to work confident that, by the time my solution was ready, the Internet would be, too!"
Erik Schannen's solution was twofold. First, people wanting to view his streaming video would have to be on broadband, in order to see a large enough high-resolution image that flowed without interruption. Second, the actual feeds would be stored on Speedera, since purchased by
Akamai, the now-omnipresent third-party content distributor with server space to spare. Combined, these two elements would address the problems plaguing Web streaming in the late 20th century.
Schannen's assessment proved to be correct ... and not so correct. On the upside, he was right that his approach made high-resolution video streaming possible. On the downside, his hope to sell the technology to carry Hollywood blockbusters just didn't pan out. "At the time, bandwidth costs to stream an entire movie were substantially more than it cost to make a VHS copy and sell it at retail," he recalls. "So there was no business case, at least not for Hollywood."
Looking for a new market, and being a connoisseur of fine gay porn himself, Schannen soon realized that his platform would be ideal for serving up gay content on the Web. In response to this opportunity, he launched Maleflixxx in 2001. The company has been growing ever since.
Talk to him for a few minutes, and you'll soon learn that Erik Schannen lives and breathes computer technology. "I love coding," he confesses. "It's what I do for fun, as well as profit." But this doesn't mean that Schannen doesn't have a personal life: He does.
"I am in a long-term, three-way relationship with my two partners Dwayne and Bill," he says. "Dwayne and I have been together for 11 years; the three of us have been together for over six."
Now, the notion of a working three-way relationship is enough to fuel many adult videos, whether gay or straight. But a relationship that has lasted six years among three people cannot be based on sex alone.
"We all try very hard to make this work," Schannen says. "A key part of why we have done so well is what is known in the polyamory world as 'compersion.' Wikipedia defines compersion as ‘the experience of taking pleasure that one's partner is with another person.' This means that you feel joy that someone you love is being loved, whether it is by you or by someone else."
Compersion may sound like starry-eyed idealism, but it is an essential element of Erik Schannen's relationship with his partners. It stands as the polar opposite of jealousy, a trait whose social acceptance Schannen finds distasteful and morally wrong. "It is astounding to me that a profoundly destructive emotion like jealousy, with all its negative consequences, is embraced rather than fought in our society," he observes. "This isn't to say that feeling compersion towards your partner is easy; it's not, because we're all human. But surely our energies are better put into something positive like truly caring that your partner is getting what they need, rather than just worrying about one's own sense of insecurity and persecuting them because you feel it."
After saying this, Schannen wonders aloud if same-sex couples don't have an easier time managing multiple partners than straight people do. "Women and men have different sets of emotions," he says. "Perhaps it is easier for gay men to work out such issues together, simply because we are all working from the same emotional blueprint?"
Setting aside his personal revelry, Erik Schannen muses over the success of Maleflixxx and the distribution system he developed for fun. Ultimately, he attributes his company's success to human nature: "Gay porn is not the sort of thing that most people are comfortable going into their local video store to rent," Schannen says. "Being able to see it over the Web is thus a natural; it gives them access to the content, even in small towns. Second, by selling access to this porn as individual scenes, we cover the bandwidth costs while, at the same time, making the content affordable to our customers. It is a win-win for everybody."
Still, when it comes to what he's most proud of, Erik Schannen points to Maleflixxx's provision of different quality content at different prices, rather than his coding prowess. "In the video store, they don't sell the latest high-budget adult feature for the same price as the DVDs in the bargain bin, so why should Internet VOD providers?" he asks. "It just makes no sense. High-quality porn costs more to make, so it should cost more to view. Likewise, low-level gonzo porn is cheap to make, and there is also a lot of older content, so why not sell it at a lower price? This way, you serve the entire spectrum of the adult market. As well, once your subscribers get tired of the cheap stuff, they'll be motivated to pay more to see the latest movies with the top stars. Ironically, once they get some experience under their belts, people are picky about their porn; gay people doubly so."
Maleflixxx lives and dies by its variable pricing strategy. To drive premium sales, the company likes to add new releases in an "episodic" format, by posting one scene at a time. "The precipitous drop in DVD sales over the past year or two has made producers increasingly rely on VOD revenues and our pricing and merchandising model has finally proven to be the only way to go," says Erik Schannen. He adds that today's gay porn consumer is hungering for material that is both edgy and raw. "It used to be that you could show any two guys having sex, and that would be enough to thrill the viewer," he says. "Those days are long gone."
While the Sureflix employees outside his office keep Maleflixxx running, Erik Schannen has been working on the next big thing, SplashShots.com. It could be called "Maleflixxx 2.0," because it combines Maleflixxx's content with a powerful search engine. Like his other commercial projects, Schannen began SplashShots as a hobby project.
"On the left side of your screen, you see thumbnails of available content, where you can search through tens of thousands of full-length scenes by any keyword, like sex acts, stars, studios, whatever you want," he says. "You can compile a playlist of clips to watch one after the other, or you can jump around your playlist as you see fit. This plays to what I call the ‘ADD' aspect of porn surfing. Guys don't like to sit and watch one scene; they like to move between scenes to get to what turns them on. My new platform allows them to have one scene playing in the big video window on the right, while they continue to search on the left." Worth noting: SplashShots may be Sureflix's first pay-per-minute platform, but the company has developed a formula to retain price differentiation by selling packages of tokens and charging 3 to 10 tokens per minute depending on the scene.
Considered as a whole person, Erik Schannen is clearly a complex being. But don't expect Schannen to describe himself in this manner, because he won't. "I just get to combine the two things I love best - computers and sex - for a living," Schannen laughs. "Truly, I've got a great life!"
This article originally appeared in the January issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
