The Agony of Video Content
By Jo Hawke, AEBN.net
You've a built nice little membership site, and now
you'd like to serve what all the other up-and-coming pay-sites have:
Movies. So, what are your options? Well, you can always cut costs
by making your own.
 Making
Your Own Movies
You break out your digital movie camera and decide that the cheapest
route to movies on the Internet is to talk your friends, the cheapest
actors you know, into getting freaky in front of the camera...
About two weeks later, you've discovered that you can't talk your
friends, or your friends, friends, or anybody else for that matter,
into getting freaky in front of the camera. Or, you can, and now you
wish to God that you'd never asked - because, now you've succeeded
in scarring your mind for life and you'll never be able to look your
fellow webmasters in the eye again.
So, to save yourself from a fate worse than death - editing all that
nasty-ass film you just spent hours shooting - you've decided that
you're just gonna go out and BUY the damn movie. Hell, you're gonna
go right on out and buy a whole friggin' bunch of them -- or rather,
the rights to use them on the Internet.
Buying Movies
In order to buy the kind of movies you want to show on your member
site, you have to find a studio whose movies you'd like to offer your
members...
Then, you have to contact the studio, buy plane tickets to whereever
they are, buy them lunch at a nice restaurant to suitably impress
them that you mean business, and then spend at least four hours talking
them into signing a content agreement - because there is no way in
hell that they're going to sell you the complete rights to a single
movie - never mind the 100 titles you had your heart set on.
Cost of Plane Ticket to California: $500.00 (on a cheap flight that
hops from airport to airport in the dead of night).
Cost of hotel: $125.00 (per night).
Cost of lunch: $300.00 (Food, drink, tipping the strippers... Oh wait,
that makes it jump to $1000.00).
Cost of Contract agreement: A major share of your profits - once you
have the movies ready to stream.
(Note to Self: Now that you have one studio's movies, you still have
well over 199 more studios to go, just to compete with the competition...)
Streaming your Movies
So, now it's time to take your hard-won movies from 200 different
studios and turn them into electronic, streaming media (Hey, you got
lucky - it only took you two years to convince all those studios to
speak to you on the phone, never mind doing actual business with you).
Streaming videos into Real and Windows media requires 24 employees
on two, 8-hour shifts (12 bodies per shift), to render 50 movies a
day into streaming media.
And then, it takes at least four experienced people to load your brand-new
streaming media onto the server and encode it so that other webmasters
can't steal (or piggyback onto) the video streams. And yes, you have
to pay all your employees for at least eight holidays a year, to sit
on their butts at home.
Cost of Equipment: 12K in one lump sum. (Cha-Ching!)
- Never mind! You are going to LEASE, at $800.00 a month instead (Small
drop in the bucket - plink).
Cost of Production Staff: roughly $24.000.00 a month (Another drop
in the bucket - plink).
Cost of Experienced Encoding Staff: roughly 8,000.00 a month. (plink)
Support employees for marketing and traffic management departments:
roughly $36,000.00 a month (plink).
Cost of Bandwidth to broadcast 800 videos: Are you Really sure you
want to go there right now (plink) (plink) (plink)?
With me so far? You have reached a total of:
The Gross National Product of the Western World.
At $20.00 per membership, how many would you have to sell to break
even?
Hmm... Breaking even is beginning to look like it's going to require
a membership be sold to every English speaking human on the planet.
In addition to a fair share of those non-English speaking folks... So
go ahead and hire that translator.
But Wait - There's More.
Cost of renting a building: $2500.00 a month (plink).
CONGRATULATIONS! You are now the proud owner of an empty warehouse.
Now you have to put in all the creature comforts to make it livable.
You know, silly things, like floors, walls, doors, paint, carpeting,
wiring, telephones, etc...
Cost of a professional contractor: $5000.00 (plink).
Unless you Really want to leave it up to your employees' doubtful
abilities. Good luck passing the building inspection.
Plus Monthly utilities (plink).
Plus basic office equipment (plink).
Let's toss in a few incidentals, such as, cigarettes, beer, coffee,
food, a stress management therapist, monthly prescription for Zanex...
Okay, you have reached a grand total of: Oh man, you ARE a sadist!
At $20.00 per membership, how many would you have to sell to break
even NOW?
Begin to think in terms of absolute global population over the next
century, and you're going see that "break even" point just over that
horizon!
And Finally...
A really good accountant that doesn't cut those company checks to
themselves, or have other clients on the side with nick-names like
"The Greek" and "Knuckles." PRICELESS (Badda-Bing!)!
Stop The Madness!
There is another way to get all the movies you need for your member
site streaming away, without all the headaches and hassle of doing
it yourself.
You can go to AEBN.com.
For No set-up fee, and starting at a measley $99.00 per month, you
can get some bandwidth, and over 200 video streams representing over
200+ studios in excess of 50+ niches, that rotate out every 30 days!
And all you have to do is drop a check in the mail.
AEBN - Streaming Video Feeds
No set-up fees
Full-length videos from 200+ studios in over 50+ niches.
All videos Real & Windows media w/DVD functions.
Video-streams from 56K to 512k broadband.
Select a few streams, or all for one low price. Bandwidth included
in price.
All content is replaced monthly, with Exclusive content available.
AEBN - It's everything you want your site to be.
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