CYBERSPACE—It's probably safe to say that everyone who watches porn is familiar with the name Pornhub, the tube site subsidiary of adult conglomerate MindGeek—and opinions run high at the mere mention of the name, with many accusing the site of permitting rampant piracy of copyrighted material.
But today, the company rolled out a new business model: an unlimited, ad-free subscription-based streaming service—in hi-def.
"Users will benefit from enhanced access to all of the content they already enjoy on Pornhub.com—with improved streaming quality—as well as over 100,000 full-length premium exclusive scenes at the touch of a finger or click of the mouse," Pornhub Vice President Corey Price said in a statement to CNBC. "We're confident our fan base will totally embrace this product and reinforce our position as the top provider of on-demand adult video."
The service, to be titled "Pornhub Premium," will cost $9.99 per month, and when it is launched, it will support Android devices and will be available on Roku. Other mobile platforms, however, will have to wait.
According to CNBC, this type of service has been under consideration at MindGeek for about two years, though Takedown Piracy owner Nate Glass recalls that the company had an identically named service some time ago, noting "They may have changed the price point a little bit." The current version of Pornhub Premium will feature content not only from other MindGeek-owned studios—Brazzers, Reality Kings, Digital Playground and Mofos—but may also pull in material from websites such as Babes.com, Twistys.com and Men.com. The company stated that it also intends to strike licensing deals with other, non-MindGeek companies.
"In my opinion, that's the way they should have been all along, that everything up there was with permission of the copyright holders, so if they're moving more in that direction, that's great," Glass said. "I think the difficulty they may have is that they have been one of the leading conditioners in the mindset of the consumer of who pays for porn, so to now try to do a 180 and make those people become paying customers, I think that's going to be an uphill battle."
What may put some companies off of providing material for the new service is Pornhub's reputation in the adult community. In 2013, Glass described Pornhub as one of the tube sites "we all know [as] notorious for copyright infringement."
Also, in a segment of ABC's Nightline in April, 2014, reporter Cecilia Vega spoke with Glass regarding the takedown notices he files on behalf of his clients, and today he confirmed that Pornhub is still one of the larger recipients of his notices.
"The problem for Pornhub is not only getting customers to pay for content but to get licenses from studios for their content," commented Mike Kulich, owner of adult streaming service SkweezMe, which rolled out in January of last year. "Established companies have spent thousands taking their pirated content off Pornhub. I don't see them getting content up unless they own the rights."
Of course, the pirated clips aren't generated by Pornhub, but uploaded to Pornhub's free side by porn fans—but piracy continues to be one of the biggest problems for the adult industry, leading to fewer productions and decreased income for the entire community.
Another objection to the site was voiced by adult actress Domino Damoiselle, who told TheGuardian.com how her income has been slashed by one-half to two-thirds since the proliferation of tube sites, in part because despite fans paying for a lot of material online, none of that income makes its way back to the performers.
"You'll get $500 from a production company like RealityKings; RealityKings sells it to Pornhub and continue to bank on that clip. You don’t get paid based on views or minutes watched," Damoiselle said.
But though the company is styling Pornhub Premium as "the Netflix of porn," it's hardly the first to provide such a service. Besides SkweezMe, iPorn, another adult streaming service, launched in March of 2013, and it's unclear how profitable those services have been. Also, Roku has several adult channels available, including FyreTV, SugarDVD, AEBN, HotMovies and AdultEmpire.
Pornhub's 60 million daily users, on the other hand, are likely to love the service, since its price is right—and because of the lack of banner and pop-up ads, and the consequent lack of exposure to possible malware.
