It’s actually quite good! The pictures are nice, too — I’m glad to see an article on Kink focusing on the tech questions, and gets them talking about their new hi-def streaming enterprise, and how they’re protecting their data. Wonderfully, the new Cnet article about Kink.com explains how they’re doing it better than MSM video and keeping the quality high — my only quibble with the piece is that they link to the negative Armory publicity without linking to the positive Armory publicity. But McCullagh also talks about the great working environment and even employee benefits, so alright. It’s still a great article. (Image of friend and Kink founder Peter Acworth in the SF Armory, via Cnet/Declan McCullagh.) Snip:
(…) That, simply put, is Kink.com’s business model, and it has propelled the company to a prominent position in the adult entertainment business. Revenue was reportedly $20 million last year, and the company recently made headlines for buying San Francisco’s former National Guard Armory, a sprawling structure with a dank and dilapidated basement said to be perfect for filming the so-called fetish entertainment for which the company is known.
It’s often said that adult entertainment companies were the first to figure out how to profitably sell content on the Internet and that they have continually found new and inventive ways to take advantage of the interactive medium while titillating their audiences.
Now Kink.com is on the cutting edge of the fight against video piracy. While mainstream entertainment outlets like Viacom and NBC complain noisily about YouTube, Kink.com, with neither the resources nor the mainstream appeal of its giant counterparts, is in an even tougher fight: Protecting the content it produces that’s continually copied and reposted on the dozens of Web sites that traffic in poached adult material.
“It’s an uphill battle–it’s never-ending,” Kink.com founder Peter Acworth said about copyright infringement in an interview with CNET News.com. “That’s one reason we’re moving in a live show direction.”
Like other online publishers, Kink.com has had to puzzle out ways to deal with the perennial problem of copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks and Usenet. Kink.com’s solution is live shows. In some ways, it’s is a throwback to a more analog era, back when the Grateful Dead encouraged taping and sharing of live concerts (while still charging admission). The band Phish follows the same model today by authorizing taping and Internet sharing for “non-commercial purposes.”
Earlier this month, Kink.com began streaming live 1080i high-definition video–at a time when mainstream sites such as CNN.com offer jerky, blurry pre-edited clips at roughly one-tenth the resolution of high-def.
Link.
