In his effort to cut out the middleman and further court the mainstream press, independent producer Mike South has moved his exclusive DVD-quality downloads to KickAssDVD.com.
The concept, which was first launched in November at JizzHer.com, is a unique one. South allows members of KickAssDVD.com to download scenes he has produced in the MPEG-2 format – the same format on a store-bought DVD. South doesn’t use digital rights management (DRM) software and, in fact, encourages users to make their own DVDs.
“That was the whole point of the site all along,” South told AVNOnline.com. “Instead of going to the store to buy your DVD, I want you to be able to take the scenes you want and drop them into whatever you use to create DVDs and burn your own DVD. Play it on any player and the quality is identical to what you would get had you bought it in the store. I’m cutting out all the middlemen.”
The model makes sense for South because as an independent producer it allows him to save on duplication, printing, and packaging costs, plus he doesn’t have to use a distributor. His only major cost is bandwidth.
“Obviously it’s using a lot of bandwidth, but that’s the beauty of it and what’s made the site viable now, is that bandwidth is very inexpensive,” he said. “If I go over my bandwidth, the amount per gigabit is so low that I’ll still remain profitable.”
Though the concept has been in place for three months, South is just now starting to push it. He moved his content from JizzHer.com to KickAssDVD.com after overtures from the mainstream technology press encouraged him to make his URL more “mainstream friendly.”
Furthermore, the site is at full capacity, with 30 scenes ranging from blowjobs to bukkake, and new scenes are rotated in to replace old ones each week.
Of course, with high quality comes longer download times – each scene, which ranges in length from 10 to 30 minutes, is between 200 and 600 MB, making a broadband connection a necessity.
But as Web surfers migrate to broadband, South believes the industry will migrate towards his business model.
“Ultimately, I think this is where the whole industry is going to go,” he said. “People like me who are independent producers are to going to make the money we should have been making all along because now we’re selling directly to the consumer.”
