InXworld (www.inxworld.com) isn’t exactly a household name in America; but if you haven’t heard of the European company yet, trust us, you will. The satellite-based porno distributor has only been around for a year and a half, but in that time they’ve come to all but own the Euro-hardcore satellite biz. Now they’re gunning for the hearts, minds, and boners of America’s porn-watching public. We caught up with InXworld business development VP Christophe Perini and got the skinny on his company and their plans for the future.
AVN Online: Give us a general overview of your company, if you would.
Christophe Perini: We’re a European company, based in the Netherlands. We started about two years ago with only one channel called FREE-X TV, and it immediately saw very, very big success here. We reached one million viewers, or subscribers, in just about a year. One reason for that is the business model that we launched, meaning that we didn’t go for a subscription-based channel, but for pre-paid access to the channel, whereby people don’t have to bother with receiving a bill every month and it’s much more discreet. The other reason is that we beat everybody on price. Europe has about 20 adult channels; we’re a very mature market. Where there was no growth in the adult TV industry, we just brought a revolution, and hit success right away. Based on that success, we developed new channels, and now we have three. The three that are available in the U.S. are FREE-X TV, X Dream TV, and Back Room, the first gay channel. We’re covering the world pretty much with our one, two, or three channels.
AO: How’s that going for you in the U.S. so far?
CP: It’s growing… not as fast as it did here in Europe, but the market is very different. We had to approach it very differently also, in terms of pricing and the package that we’ve created. But we have found the distributors that we wanted, and the cards are going out little by little. The main difference we found is that the U.S. is not a satellite world. There are two big players, but that’s pretty much it for satellite. In Europe, all we sell is cards because we know people are equipped for satellite reception; in the U.S. we have to design the whole kit where for $369 you get the set top box, the dish, the access card – the whole kit to receive the programming.
AO: How does your service work for someone who already has satellite TV in his home?
CP: If you have DirecTV, all you need is a double LNB – that’s the little head pointing towards the dish – and you connect it to our set top box. You wouldn’t need a second dish. We are training the distributors and the installers, and we are putting the word out that it is easy. If people currently have DirecTV and are interested in adult, it doesn’t take much to get three full channels, pretty hardcore, 24 hours a day.
AO: What if you have Dish Network?
CP: Then you need to install another dish.
AO: What’s the programming on your channels like?
CP: We’re the low-cost carrier of the adult industry, like Southwest Airlines is in travel – very low pricing with standard quality. We don’t have the latest movies, mainly because when we acquire movies we need worldwide rights, and obviously the biggest names are sold country by country. We show videos from studios like Anabolic, Sunshine, Platinum… We have one- or two-year-old movies on display, but they are available 24 hours a day. There are always one or two movies added per day, and we show nothing but movies. If you do a comparison, a pay-per-view block on [our competitors] is easily $10 to $15 for three or however many hours. For that same amount of money – for $15 – you get the equipment you need to receive our channels, plus three channels, 24 hours a day, for one month.
AO: What differentiates your channels from each other?
CP: FREE-X TV is standard adult fare. The The X-Dream channel is more of an amateur genre channel, and Back Room is all gay content, the first and only gay men’s 24/7 channel out there.
AO: Is your U.S. content different from what you show in Europe?
CP: No. Our philosophy is "sex is fun wherever you are in the world," and that’s what we want to show on the channels. So we buy movies from all over the world, and we show them in the language they were filmed in, which adds personality to the channels, which has been in high demand in Europe. In the U.S., we’ve had some good feedback both at the AVN trade show in Las Vegas and through the network of distributors we’ve set up.
AO: How many countries is your service available in?
CP: We’re in Australia and the U.S. and neighboring countries, which means the border with Canada and Mexico. Elsewhere we’re probably present in over 60 or 70 countries, because we’re in all of Europe, Northern Africa, and parts of the Middle East.
AO: What is your overall business philosophy?
CP: I think what we’ve done is to look at the market in a different way, and to pretty much break the rules. That was our intention from the start, to come up with a new business model that would take something that’s in high demand everywhere in the world and make it easier to access. Before, because of the subscription you were tied in to a payment for one or two or three years. That rebuked a lot of people. By introducing a pre-paid card, we took the adult market by surprise. It was that simple, I would say. We were able to build our brand name with the best marketing there is, which is word of mouth.
AO: Do you foresee the same thing happening in the U.S.?
CP: If we can find the right angle, yes. Which means instead of targeting the satellite population, we need to address the adult viewers. So we need to find the right entry point to that community and get the word out, which is what I’m working on.
