Of all the companies that have jumped on the bandwagon to market Internet content on DVD, none has made its presence felt as strongly as CinemaPlay Entertainment. It is the DVD distribution arm of Adult.com, a network of 110 pay sites with 40 million unique visitors each month.
CinemaPlay was founded in December 2003, kicked off its distribution network at the Adult Expo in early 2004, and now releases six to eight DVD titles per month. All consist of re-purposed Web content.
CinemaPlay's unique feature, according to president David Stidham, is driving traffic to retail stores through its member sites. "We developed a database of members who were interested in our DVD products," he said. "We direct those consumers to retail outlets to buy the DVDs. We tell 40 million fans that the DVDs are available."
Now CinemaPlay is branching out to distribute a new product line from Spice Studios — material that originated as broadcast content on the far-reaching Spice Network with its millions of subscribers.
It will be the first time that Spice, since it became a Playboy Entertainment-owned entity more than a decade ago, has made its programming available on video for retail consumers. Having already branded its name with a novelty line through Topco Sales and a clothing line from Leather & Lace, it is about to extend that branding to DVDs, through CinemaPlay.
"We played nice on TV. Now it's time to get dirty." That's the slogan of Spice Studios, meaning that its content will be harder than anything the Spice Network is able to program on cable. It means XXX, not XX or XX 1/2. Like most porn sold in stores, it will include ejaculation and anal sex.
And with CinemaPlay, Spice will have the sales expertise of a company that has rapidly developed a reputation for innovative marketing.
A visit to CinemaPlay.com reveals a map of the U. S. where stores selling their DVDs are highlighted. There are even maps on how to reach them.
"When you have that many people and you can shepherd them in a direct way, where they're not being solicited but rather being offered goods and services that they want more information on, we have found that's a niche that works for us," Stidham said.
"The people that immediately jump on it," he continued, "are people like General Video or Capitol News, people that actually own retail stores, or the Goalies of the world — they just — ?Yeah, here's where our stores are, thank you for the traffic, thank you for promoting us.'
"There's other people that direct people to certain Websites to buy the product at suggested retail prices — we're not involved in that. Adult.com has been a service provider for so many of the Websites that they're careful not to step on other people's toes."
At this year's Adult Expo, CinemaPlay introduced its first contract girl, Destiny St. Claire. She has been in the industry for almost two years, appearing in "about 60" sex scenes but managing to avoid over-exposure. The ideal blend of adult star and real-life girl, she works in Porn Valley but makes her home in Cleveland, Ohio.
St. Claire will be appearing in both CinemaPlay and Spice releases. "Anywhere we can help build the Spice Studios brand name and promote our talent in association with it, we're very excited to do that," Stidham said.
CinemaPlay plans eventually to have a roster of 10 contract players, female and male — and there will be plenty of work for them. With all the sites Adult.com needs to feed with content, its producers are constantly turning out product, 10 to 15 scenes a week, shooting all over the United States and Canada and in Europe.
Everything falls into the niche of reality-based programming. According to Stidham, "If you look at the content on Internet sites, it's pretty much reality-based." Internet mavens, he said, "want to believe that what they're seeing is actually happening."
Among his best performers is Limo Patrol. The limousine used in the series is garaged in the company's Chatsworth warehouse, taking up space that will soon be needed for more DVDs.
Other top-selling lines are Girls Hunting Girls (from the site that "proves all girls are lesbians"), Teen Hitchhikers, MILF Cruiser, Needy Housewives, and Girls of Amateur Pages, from the AmateurPages.com site that gets a million and a half unique visitors a day.
Two CinemaPlay titles, Girls of Amateur Pages and Girls Hunting Girls 2, were nominated for AVN awards last year, as Best Pro-Am Release and Best All-Girl Feature, respectively.
The hook for Girls Hunting Girls is two girls picking up another girl and converting her to lesbian sex. "It does very well on the Internet because guys like to watch that," Stidham said.
The target audience for Adult.com and CinemaPlay is the younger male demographic, so all of their lines play up youth-oriented humor. "Stores near college campuses do extremely well with our product," Stidham said.
He acknowledges that "we have a variety of different lines we put out, not all of them do well." Those that do follow strongly researched marketplace trends.
"CinemaPlay identified a trend with MILF Cruisers," Stidham said, "so our MILF Cruiser series just goes through the roof. Our Teen Hitchhikers series works well. We tweak it as we go along for the DVD market so we can make that perfect fit with the retailers and the distributors who work with the retailers, making sure our product works with the consumers."
In such areas, CinemaPlay can draw on the considerable resources of Adult.com, which he calls "a great mechanism that was set up to capture traffic. Adult.com doesn't sell traffic, they buy traffic."
Adult.com, Stidham said, started in 1996. "It's just a massive amount of Websites with a variety of assets and programs they offer to their Webmasters. They started providing services — hosting, marketing, legal advice — for all the new people coming in. Forums like the GFY (Go Fuck Yourself) bulletin board, with about 7,000 postings a day, for everybody that has a concern, from talent to distributors to whatever, a free forum to go on and speak."
Among the Websites hosted by Adult.com are SpiceRaw.com and SpiceUncensored.com. They also have the Playboy Cash Affiliates program. So it was actually a natural progression for Spice to go to CinemaPlay for its retail distribution bow.
Stidham has a long background in adult (he worked with such legends as Norman Arno at VCX and Sidney Niekirk at Cal Vista), and with Spice he is collaborating closely with two other veterans.
Director Bud Lee, an AVN Hall of Famer, directs the Spice broadcast shows that are being re-purposed as DVDs. Bob Johnson, who has seen executive duty at Crescent Publishing in New York and later at Private USA, is Spice Studios' executive producer and director of marketing.
"Bud and David and I," Johnson said, "we go back far too many years, all of us involved in major companies in all parts of the adult world. It's a very strong troika of adult experience here."
Spice's first release through CinemaPlay will be a three-DVD set, Spice Hotel. It has a total of 15 XXX scenes, five boy-girl scenes to a disc, plus one solo scene featuring the porn star host of the disc in question — 18 scenes in all.
The solo scenes of the three hosts — Destiny St. Claire, Ariana Jollee and Holly Hollywood — come from another Spice Network program, Spice Clips, "a single-girl XX show where they talk to callers, masturbate with toys and show clips," Lee said.
"We selected Spice Hotel," Stidham said, "primarily because of the stars that are in it. We wanted to have a product that doesn't compete with the CinemaPlay line. We don't have big adult stars in CinemaPlay."
Spice has a reputation for softer sex scenes — the cable-safe kind. But, Lee said, "We do shoot and keep for our own assets the harder pieces, mainly pop shots. If we do anal or anything like that, it's nothing that gets on the air, but it exists, it's in our library."
They'll be making plenty of trips to the library to make sure that the XXX release of Spice Hotel is hot enough for stores. As an added inducement, the Spice Hotel set will be packaged with a High Definition DVD for PC use.
"We believe with our markets we have couch potatoes and mouse potatoes," Stidham said. "The mouse potatoes have DVD players and they also have laptops, their PCs that they play on, and they all want to mess around with new technology. We want to be cutting edge with technology, since it a big part of what we're involved with on the Internet side."
"High Def is a big push with Spice Studio," Johnson added. "Spice Hotel is shot completely in High-Definition. That is our benchmark."
Spice Studios will eventually have six full niche-friendly lines: Spice Raw, Spice Uncensored, Spice Latin, Spice International, Spice Interracial and Spice Amateur.
Speaking of the XXX rating, Stidham cautioned, "We're not looking for any rough stuff whatsoever." He mentions cutting a sequence from CinemaPlay's Limo Patrol that showed a girl playfully resisting a guy's advances. They avoid "any notion of coercion or resistance from the female." But, he adds, "The girls are fresh, the product is hot, there's lots of passion, it does the job. We just don't want to push the envelope."
Director Lee was eager to emphasize the interactive nature of Spice Hotel, a unique feature. "People can call in on an 800 number and talk directly to the talent and kind of put them through their paces."
Anyone, he said, can participate. "We tell people on the DVD where to go and how to get involved," he said. "It's a really interesting thing that nobody else is doing. We're on every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night from midnight eastern, 9:00 PST, and they can jump right in. 1-800-SPICE-TV. And maybe they'll hear their voice on one of the DVDs some day."
According to Stidham, CinemaPlay and Spice are in pre-development on several new projects, including some high-end features. New lines, he said, "will be announced at a time when we've concluded our surveys on what's hot in the marketplace. We can put something up on the Internet and find out two hours later whether it works or not. Spice has a catalog, they have TV channels, they can look at things and say, ?This is a trend that's working, we can really rock with it.'"
The bottom line with Spice, Johnson said, is that it "wants to deliver all adult content to everyone who wants adult content, on all platforms."
Stidham concurred. "CinemaPlay is going to fully leverage all of the assets that Spice has across all of the channels. Spice is going to produce this product that they're putting on their Websites, on their channels and their VoD platforms and e-commerce. The DVD component — CinemaPlay is going to make sure that it gets out to the brick and mortar retail markets. So the consumer can see it on TV and now here on DVD, including scenes too hot to show you on TV."
If it works as well for the broadcast content of Spice as it has for the Web content of Adult.com, it sounds like another formula for success.
Distributors and dealers, call CinemaPlay at 800.791.1551. For casting, contact Robin for CinemaPlay: 800.791.1551, or Bud Lee for Spice Studios: 323.276.4325.
