By Skip Ferderber
It’s late on a sunny Friday afternoon in San Francisco when Seda crawls slowly, painfully, on her hands and knees into The Lounge, a large room decorated in 19th-century Edwardian bordello baroque on the fourth floor of Kink.com. Naked, shaved, chains attached to her neck, ankles and wrists, a bright red gag ball in her mouth, she’ll be the object of certainly unsparing BDSM attention for the next 90 or so minutes while a small group of couples watch and occasionally join in the merriment.
But the Lounge audience is only half the story. The more important guests are the hundreds of paying Kink.com members around the world watching Seda, a paid model, and her adventures: in this instance, her “review” after four days of slave training. As Kink.com subscribers, they’re watching in live 720P high definition, which is fast becoming the video standard for all Kink.com webcasts. And according to the Kink.com production staff, that web audience is benefitting from high-definition wireless transmission systems that allow Kink directors and videographers to cut the tie that binds—the cable from the camera—giving them the freedom to move freely and add a sense of immediacy to live webcasts.
A check with several adult production video facilities indicates that Kink.com is an early adopter of this technology.
To understand the site’s commitment to live webcasts, consider the following:
At Kink.com’s 200,000-square-foot, four-story headquarters, in what was once the San Francisco Armory, every set in the building is wired with HD/SDI jacks, connected to HD/SDI cables that snake everywhere throughout the building. That means any production, any time, can plug into the in-house network and transmit a live show at will. The miles of cables all wind up in a sophisticated switchbox filled with multiple patch bays, deep in the building’s basement, where multiple feeds can be monitored and selected for streaming. Many of Kink.com’s 16 play-for-pay websites can and do carry live webcasts; all have the capacity to do so.
“When I talk to vendors,” said Nicole Aptekar, a key member of the production operations department, overseeing new technology options and recommendations, as well as all content encoding, “the analogy I generally give is that we function similarly to a news station because we’re producing about as much content as a local news channel, except in our case we want to keep every piece of it. We produce 30 to 40 hours of HD content and we save all of it.”
Recently, the entire digital library was re-encoded to make those webcasts more viewable for today’s audiences. All its original SD content is available as 480P progressive, H.264, Windows Media and Flash encoding. All HD content is now available as 720P.
Generating that quantity of live video over the years has made the production staff painfully aware of how difficult cable-attached cameras are on live production.
“Previously, we had these HD/SDI cables with genlock that we were wrangling through a set,” she said. “It turns out that it limits what you can do in a live broadcast situation, especially for our type of content, which is generally less scripted and a real experience.”
Take UltimateSurrender.com, a live wrestling website that features unscripted tussles between women: the winner earns the right to subject the loser to hardcore lesbian bondage, fucking, et al. at the end of each match. According to Ian Baker, Aptekar’s production colleague, “Especially for that kind of [show], wireless is really a useful thing. You have to have another person there just to hold onto a cable and move it around so a videographer can do their job. Moving the cable around and having to deal with that is doable, but it’s a pain.”
And that was the problem that took Aptekar and Baker to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in 2009, looking for a good HD wireless answer not only for UltimateSurrender.com but also for other shows where the cinematographer needed freedom to move around without the umbilical cable.
The company had previously used the IDX CAM~WAVE system, an inexpensive ($6,000) HD wireless system, but found they needed a more powerful system.
At NAB, their search led them to U.K.-based Boxx TV and its Meridian zero-delay HD wireless transmission system. Built for the rigors of broadcast news and similar operations, the system consists of a four-antenna, 1.5-pound transmitter generally mounted on the camera and two different models of receivers: one for small monitors and a second, larger high-gain receiver. With a typical operational range of a U.S. football field, Boxx uses MIMO antenna technology to handle the high payload of sending an HD signal. No frequency licenses are needed, and the system also allows two or up to six wireless cameras to operate in the same immediate environment. Depending on the provisioning, systems typically sell for between $12,000 and $30,000.
Rzo, one of Kink.com’s staff videographers, is extremely pleased with the freedom the wireless technology has given him. “It enables me to smoothly walk through a party environment without tripping up on the people and furniture,” he said. “A lot of times on weekend parties, we’ll have up to over 100 guests. I’ve shot it with cable and I’d get trapped and I’d need a whole other person wrangling my cable. [With the Boxx system] I’m able to seamlessly go around the room and broadcast that over HD.”
Two internally developed tweaks for the Boxx system are improving the usefulness of the system.
First, a custom-built aluminum harness, designed by Aptekar, allows the videographer to wear the camera antenna on his back. Raising it higher than camera level, if even slightly higher, allows tighter uninterrupted communication between camera and receiver.
Also, the production team is planning to get even smoother coverage by redistributing the five individual antennas from the high-gain receiver (which resembles a metal bar topped with small flags) and attaching them roughly three feet apart to the walls of individual rooms as part of a set. “You get better reception when you expand the antenna diversity,” added Aptekar.
Kink.com’s goal is for the site to webcast 24 hours a day, but they’re not quite there yet. The Upper Floor, the company’s most ambitious project, will probably be among the first to do so, however. A living facility as well as a website, it’s bringing to life several aspects of the dominant/submissive lifestyle depicted in Pauline Reage’s notorious novel, The Story of O, with a healthy slice of we-never-close Big Brother voyeurism thrown in.
Virtually everything on The Upper Floor is shown live and also edited into well-produced pieces. There’s even an experimental setup: a consumer camcorder mounted in the ceiling, linked to an Apple Mac Mini for encoding purposes and with zoom and pan capabilities, will soon offer 24/7 coverage of everything that happens in the room.
James Mogul is one of Kink.com’s cadre of directors, and the co-creator of The Upper Floor, along with Kink.com’s founder and reigning lord and master, Peter Acworth. “Peter is the master of the house,” he said. “I am the butler. We’re building a house for Peter: That’s the core concept. From that come the events. Everything revolves around him, his house and his generous perverted mind.”
While webcasts have emanated from The Lounge for a while, the entire floor is being renovated to house the lifestyle. Next to The Lounge, a room larger in size will be the dining room for all employees, models and guests. (Naturally there will be ceiling suspension fixtures, etc.) There will be a full kitchen, a slave quarters and The Sanctum, a room for special events such as slave graduations from one level to another.
Outside The Lounge, currently the central room in the complex, a high-gain Boxx receiver is positioned near the main door, enabling the pickup of video and audio signals from inside the room. It’s also powerful enough to pick up signals from most parts of The Upper Floor.
The plan is for every Upper Floor room to provide videographers the freedom of movement that Rzo now has in The Lounge, and continuous 24/7 uninterrupted coverage anywhere on the floor.
Added Michael Galvin, director of production support, “We try to make real what the directors want. Our challenge is to provide continuous live streaming signal from everywhere. That’s what wireless HD is allowing us to do.”
This article originally ran in the June 2010 issue of AVN.
