Something is streaming in Mill Valley, and it isn’t water. XVN debuted its adult video-on-demand website this week.
XVN co-owners Evan Horowitz and Michael Landau, who also own affiliate program XPays, had the choice to white-label the project or build the infrastructure from the ground up. The pair chose the more difficult path of building the system themselves.
“When you go to budget-out a VOD site, you start to get into storage relation issues and the cluster of storage machines,” Horowitz explained. “We formed a partnership with Pan Pacific Media Inc. to solve that. We opened a new office in Mill Valley, which is separate from the XPays office, but XPays is the exclusive affiliate program for XVN.
“Pan Pacific Media is providing all the back-end staff for the customer service of the XVN users: encoding, streaming, the VOD platform, and all of the back-end stuff,” Horowitz said. “The front-end stuff is done at XVN. Nonetheless, Michael and I at XPays have overseen the entire foundation [from] start to finish, including all the hiring, etc.”
Horowitz said XVN’s model convinced major adult studios to sign on immediately.
“We were very fortunate, because when we went to Vivid, Vivid said, ‘Great. Here’s a whole ton of titles,’” he revealed. “We went to Metro; they said, ‘Here’s a ton of titles.’ [That’s how it went] on and on down the road, to the point that before we even opened our doors, we had 150 studios already.”
The embarrassment of riches in titles is one reason the company had to design its own delivery system.
“Right now, we’re at about 130 terrabytes of clustered raid storage,” Horowitz said. “Most people in the hosting world would consider that to be a pretty big number.”
With the playlist set, Horowitz and Landau focused on the technical details they thought would set their new venture apart from others like it.
“When you skip in one of our movies, it goes directly to the spot you’ve chosen,” Horowitz said. “Instead of being a progressive download, it’s actually true streaming. You can skip to anywhere in a movie. This is actually a new platform.
“Another very distinctive thing about the website is that we have 2257 data on all content on the site,” he continued. “So that means that it’s a secure and safe place to be a secondary producer or a third-level producer.”
As for payments to webmasters, Horowitz commented, “The affiliate model for XVN is a revshare. The price point is fractionally lower than other VODs, and we have no all-you-can-eat buffet. The reason we have no all-you-can-eat is because to XVN, that’s just an old-school model; that’s not new. Pay-per-minute users only pay for what they use. That’s a huge benefit.”
