UNITED KINGDOM—Portland TV, the company behind UK adult broadcaster Television X, has announced a partnership with London-based start-up and identity specialist Veridu for age verification services.
UK on-demand regulator ATVOD, under Rule 11, requires that hardcore content offered by UK VOD providers is placed behind access control and that technical tools are used to verify customers are 18+ at point of registration.
Portland has wrestled with age verification since on-shoring its web operations in 2011. An initial move to credit card-only transactions saw revenues take a severe hit given the volume of UK customers for whom debit cards are the preferred payment route. Portland was quick to introduce a ‘belt and braces’ approach to age verification by running checks against independent and reliable data sources via a third party identity provider.
“I’d like to thank Intelligent ID for getting us started, but the market’s shifted," said Chris Ratcliff, Managing Director of Portland TV. "Ultimately, I needed a broader range of data sets to verify against. Veridu have been particularly enterprising in this respect. They offer the traditional checks against the UK electoral role, a number of credit reference agencies and passport and driving licence data. Even here—by working closely together—we’ve been able to reduce the costs and significantly improve the match rates.
“The next step is to commission an independent audit of the accuracy of Veridu’s ability to age verify using social sign-on," he added. "If we can crack this, it will further reduce costs and ease the whole on boarding process by removing the need for customers to share sensitive personal data when they sign up. Let’s face it, the last thing you want to hand over to your favourite porn site is your passport or driving license.”
As part of the deal, Portland is sharing its full list of pre-verified UK users with Veridu. This means that anyone signing up with Veridu will be able to run an age verification check against this data free-of-charge before making calls to external datasets, provided they similarly agree to pool their verifications to build a federated dataset.
Ratcliff added, “Veridu have really grasped the need for a low-cost, easy-to-implement solution with no prohibitive upfront premiums. It’s ideal whatever scale of business you run.”
Commenting on the deal, Veridu CEO and Founder Rasmus Groth said, “The adult industry wants to solve the age verification challenge in a way that works for them, rather than having prohibitively expensive solutions imposed on them that will only drive kids onto illegal sites. We want to help with solutions that provide actual safety for kids, rather than just introducing expensive procedures that make the problem worse.”
Portland is also working with Telecom 2 to integrate their mobile age verification solution, Verime, which checks the age verification status of a person's mobile SIM by polling their mobile network operator to verify if the handset has been enabled for adult services. This solution is pending regulatory approval.
For more on Portland TV, go here.
