Here are some things that should remain impossible: A quick trip to Vegas, a quick drink at the Algonquin, and a quick spin around The Erotic Networks' TeN.com. There's something about these ventures that necessitates devising alibis and hoping voicemail picks up, that makes you wish you had a little more time, that you could reschedule your appointments. Because once you've entered the online wonderland that is TeN.com, you don't want to leave.
New Frontier Media (Nasdaq: NOOF) is the Boulder, CO-based adult media powerhouse, and The Erotic Networks (TEN) is its subscription and pay TV subsidiary. TeN.com is its Internet arm, providing a comprehensive distillation of TEN's offerings elsewhere, and providing a unique internet experience while mimicking the breadth of media available to broadcast customers.
New Frontier Media was once Inroads Interactive, a company that released educational titles on CD-ROM. Founders Michael Weiner and Mark Kreloff then noticed the staggering sales of an adult disc they produced, and how it dwarfed the earnings of another Inroads project about zoos. It was almost a mandate. New Frontier came into being soon after.
New Frontier now occupies two buildings in Boulder: a digital broadcast facility on Airport Blvd. and administrative headquarters in an office park. Full-time staff is about 130.
Consolidation, acquisitions, and infrastructure improvements characterized the first half of 2003 for TEN, and its flagship Website has emerged as a graceful yet robust vehicle for the delivery of gigabytes of top-notch adult content.
Steve Walter, New Frontier's vice president of New Business Development, describes TEN as "a program aggregator." That means that, aside from the bumpers and sweepers (promos and logos), all TEN's content is produced elsewhere, leaving the company to flex its creativity in growing the business. Culling content from over 50 studios in Porn Valley and beyond, TEN's Digital Broadcast Center has a library of 10,000 adult titles with room for 40,000 more. Contributing studios sign a Master License Agreement with New Frontier that covers everything from redistribution prospects to 2257 documentation. "All the Ts get crossed," Walter says.
Each title can then be edited, repurposed, and repackaged for viewing in a number of present and future formats. In addition, it isn't a chore to continue keeping dialup customers happy. While Walter estimates that 75 percent of TeN.com's customers have high speed access, all the site's goodies are still available for viewing at bandwidths from 56K to 500K.
Squeezing all of this content down the Internet pipe is a challenge, and the user experience varies: a customer might be a direct TeN.com subscriber or might receive TeN.com's content through an affiliate site. If the latter, TEN's branding is very subtle, providing for fluid integration with the affiliate's interface.
"We are aiming for seamless integration," says Scott Strother, TEN's vice president of Web Development. "We don't want anything detracting from the experience."
And the experience is vast. Despite its ease of navigation and mature search capability, there is just so much to see that mere beak-dipping is not an option. One can search for movies under title, studio, and star (a formidable undertaking on its own), but the six-member Web team at TEN has gone database happy with several other search functions, including Setting, Clothing, Sexual, and Physical. So one can search for natural breasts (2,312 clips), F-on-M orgies (67), prison scenes (22) or poolside scenarios (273), or, simply, cheerleaders (surprisingly few offerings at 17). The database does not yet allow for cross-searches, such as natural-breasted cheerleaders in prison, but the mind already reels.
For instance, a user can browse thousands of photo galleries, read a horoscope, solicit sex advice from "Tina", and search and save Favorites. TeN.com e-mail accounts are available, as are innovative scenarios for suggestable people who still can't decide what to search for: the "I Would Like To..." section provides a number of options, from "I would like to fuck on a plane" to "I would like to sell my house, buy a farm, and invite my friends over to fuck in the barn." The links then take the surfer to content-specific video clips.
The snippets are arranged for maximum efficiency. "All killer, no filler" as Walter says. The folks at TEN mandate that their Video On Demand material furnishes a sex scene within the first two minutes of the credits rolling. Its Internet counterpart had better cut to the chase a lot sooner, lest it risk untimely exits. That is why TeN.com clips get right into the action with no messy exposition. If a subscriber is curious about the storyline, he can read a one-line description before downloading the RealAudio, Shockwave or Windows Media file. (The logline of Kiki D'Aire's Sex Tribe 2, for example, is "A mystical statue leads Allysin to an ancient Indian healing tribe and its sexually-powered leader." Have you heard enough?)
"The average (surfer's) stay is about seven to ten minutes," Walter says. But for an adult Webmaster, the possibilities are astronomical. Content galore and an easy way to find it.
Overall customer retention beats the industry average. Of its 11,000 subscribers, TeN.com keeps 40 percent of them more than four months, which is a lot of bang for the $19.95 per month customers shell out.
One would imagine that the tradeoff for such a low fee would be the prevalence of pop-ups and upsells. Not true. While penis enlargement and Live Amateur sites ads unobtrusively line the pages, pop-ups are rare. Walter explains that the 20 or so partner sites trade annoying overexposure for prominent, steady placement on TeN.com. Customers know when they are leaving the site for that of a partner by the flash of a refreshingly honest "Upsell" title bar. At that point, Strother adds, the customer is prompted to authorize charges to his credit card on file or cancel and go back to TeN.com. "If you are our customer, you know exactly what you are being charged for." Plus, he says, "bombarding with pop-ups is distracting; we can maximize the upsell without turning off the customer."
Other upsells include Webcams and live chats. Charlie Suthard is New Frontier's Internet Sales Manager, and he has gathered partners and affiliates together using everything from iGallery's old rolodexes to cold calling to tracking people down on Instant Messenger.
"We're proud of what we've got going here," Suthard says.
In a year that saw the departure of New Frontiers' co-founder Mark Kreloff, a consolidation of operating facilities from Sherman Oaks, CA to North Boulder, and a restructuring of the Internet group, the company managed to streamline its Internet Department and sign a deal with On Command to distribute adult fare to over 895,000 hotel rooms nationwide. The company is also in talks with mainstream content sites like IFILM.com (which is free but has its own upsell sections) to further disseminate TEN's product.
Walter pointed out that risqu� material has always been a big attraction on sites like IFILM, and it was striking that Walter, Strother, Suthard and I had been on a conference call for almost 20 minutes before anyone felt the necessity to use the term "adult content"; the line between mainstream and adult, at least with relation to business and technology, gets harder to pinpoint daily.
"Still," Strother says, "people expect us to show up in a snakeskin suit, with gold chains and chest hair," despite the fact that TEN's Boulder compound includes a state of the art digital broadcast facility which most mainstream outfits would kill for. "We try to hide as much chest hair as we can."
But TEN needn't worry about sartorial choices, in much the same way that their closest cable/pay TV competitor, whose CEO wears only pajamas, doesn't. According to a recent New Frontier press release, TEN's VoD offerings net up to 280 percent more revenue for affiliates than Hollywood movies.
"We can purchase a piece of media in the morning," Walter says, "and it will be screened for quality. Then we will have it ingested, converted, and catalogued by the end of the day." The media, according to Strother, is then batched into as many as 15 output files for TEN's TV channels, On Command's Video On Demand trade, and TeN.com's subscribers and affiliates. A database scheduling system then apportions clips for regular daily updates of movie and photo libraries, adhering to the adult Webmaster creed of Always Be Updating.
My only criticisms of TeN.com, similar to criticisms of Apple's Music Store, is that TeN.com offers so much that not finding something is almost inexplicable. Why isn't there more ethnic content or any Shane's World or any of Digital Playground's version of Tera Patrick? Simply because TEN does not - yet - have contracts with the studios that provide that material. Regardless, the quality and quantity of what's there is amazing.
"If you deliver the good stuff, and a lot of it," Walter says, "you've got a long-term customer."
Having tackled the issue of getting customers to come back, the new problem might be getting them to leave.
Marty Barrett divides his time between writing for and being a technology consultant to the entertainment industry. As Gram Ponante, he edited AVN.com. He lives in Los Angeles at www.martybarrett.net.
