Pink Visual in 2012: More Interactivity, $ for Free Content
YNOT – Coming off a whirlwind tour of the January adult entertainment industry trade shows and the Pron Party it hosted during the Consumer Electronic Show, Pink Visual’s plans for 2012 amount to “doing more of the same, only doing it better,” according to Chief Executive Officer Allison Vivas.
“We’ve had a strong focus on the mobile market over the last several years, and increasing our penetration of that market will continue to be among our top priorities,” Vivas said. “In terms of new wrinkles to our strategy, the primary one is going to be enhancing the interactivity of our products by incorporating more live entertainment, more video gaming and other, similar elements.”
Vivas said Pink Visual’s next major launch will be an ad-supported, free streaming video site designed to offer adult studios a way to profit when end-users view their content without charge.
“In talking to the heads of other adult studios about the state of the market, one of the most frustrating things for them in recent years has been seeing their content generate literally millions of views on free sites that are displaying their content without their permission, and yet they get no direct revenue from all those views,” Vivas said. “On the site we’re developing, the advertising revenue generated by views of their content is shared directly with the studio. The more their content is viewed, the more the studio earns.”
The heart of the system, Pink Visual’s award-winning PVLocker.com, is a major departure from the company’s subscription-based model. Offering content that is sold one scene at a time, PVLocker enables users to store their purchased content “in the cloud,” where they can then watch the videos in cross-platform fashion on their PC, smartphone or tablet device.
Another aspect of Pink Visual’s strategy that will remain firmly in place is the studio’s anti-piracy efforts, Vivas said.
“We are going to continue to enforce our intellectual property rights vigorously, including through litigation when necessary,” she said. “It’s not that we are eager to sue anybody, but we aren’t going to hesitate to do so when the situation calls for it.”
Vivas explained that litigation is just one part of Pink Visual’s approach to intellectual property theft. She described the company’s anti-piracy efforts as “a comprehensive effort driven as much by technical innovation as by legal action.”
“We don’t separate our anti-piracy strategy from our overall business strategy,” Vivas said. “Building and launching sites like PVLocker.com and PinkVisualGames.com is a direct result of our focus on the root causes of widespread piracy, and reflect our belief that if you offer a higher-quality experience to consumers, more of them will buy.”
Vivas also emphasized that offering a quality experience to consumers “involves much more than just entertaining them,” adding that treating customers right is something the adult entertainment industry needs to “fully absorb” in order to improve the state of the industry.
“As an industry, there’s still a lot of room for our public image to improve,” she said. “Of course there’s an unfair stigma attached to what we do, but some of the negative perceptions people have about the adult industry are perceptions that the industry itself has created and encouraged in the past.
“As an industry, we need to work towards to winning respect through ethical and fair practices,” she added. “Holding each other accountable and respecting each other’s intellectual property rights is part of that, but the bigger part is how we interact with our customers. That’s where we need to earn respect first and foremost, and then a broader respect of society as a whole will follow.”