Edited by - 1976 on 9/30/2021 6:42:15 PM

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VR porn studios are already selling lifetime memberships. By offering their catalogue on a hard drive if they purchase a lifetime membership with the added cost of the hard drive, they would also be reducing how much that person has to download/stream from their website. So it's someone with a lifetime membership that's not downloading all their catalogue or having to stream it all cause they already have most of it on their hard drive already. They could offer it as a service and if nobody wants it they don't sell it, but if people want it, that's more revenue from more lifetime memberships being sold.

If I was making VR porn and selling lifetime memberships I would offer this as a service and I think it would stand out as a unique deal. You could even package the hard drives with bonuses of some sort if you want. Like porn collectibles or something. Just something to consider for all the porn studios that read comments on here.

Edited by - rocco on 9/30/2021 11:03:28 PM

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That said, retired product lines, defunct studios-if you develop rapport, ask privately, and nicely-ye might receive.

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The whole point of lifetime pornsite subscriptions is like yearly gym memberships, they want you to subscribe for a long period not only because of the money you sink in but also because when customers know the content is always there waiting for them the customers don't feel pressured to try to download and backup everything, effectively meaning that yearly subscribers don't necessarily download more than people who get a month or two's sub feeling pressured to get their money's worth in the time available to them.

In fact most sites don't even want you to download scenes to begin with, let alone possess full siterips, they just want you to stream them so that you'll have to sink in for lifetime (which they will later upsell with extras/spinoffs) or be a returning customer.

Edited by - hoochimama on 10/1/2021 10:42:56 AM

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Pros
1. You increase your engagement in reviews and feedback
A lot of videos that you download and stream let you rate them and leave a feedback message on them. People in general rate the ones they actually watch or go through. They aren't rating the hundreds of VR they don't. However if you have a hard drive full of all the scenes, what happens is you make it more convient for them to load it in something like Skybox and go through and watch them all or more of them over time. This means they are going to find some gems in there that they likely would have never looked at before and they will go back to the site to find more of these girls and comment something like we need more of her!

2. You will get more positive reviews
Everyone knows the best VR experience is from viewing the downloaded file, yet the studios don't want you to download too much. Yet almost all their websites don't stream above 2k. So what you stream is a little fuzzy looking, you have to wait on loading at times, you have to go into the video, back out a few times, then back in sometimes to even get it to load the stream. You have poor preview options meaning you can't hover over a part to see what the part is about, you often have to just click and play it. And the big one is you get a bad browser player that doesn't let you adjust the angle like an advanced app like Skybox. For example if you watch a streaming VR scene and they are having sex on the couch and then move to the bed, it almost always warps the positioning and now what you are looking at is in the air. You either have to go lay down on a bed for that part to get your eye level with where the camera is or you have to download the file and play it in Skybox app so you can lower the positioning and bring it in closer. All playing experiences are better if you have the downloaded file and scenes you would otherwise not care for could end up being one of your favorite scenes if you just downloaded it and viewed it with an app like Skybox. A better playing experience that leads people to find more of their favorite scenes means a lot more positive reviews and feedback online.

3. It reduces your streaming/hosting costs
If you have 1,000 lifetime subs that buy the upgrade package of getting them on a hard drive for an extra $300, you reduced the streaming costs those 1000 accounts would have required.

4. It reduces your security/support costs
You also reduce your security costs of monitoring all those downloads. I sign in with my login with a VPN and use Jdownloader to manage my downloads. I have to use Jdownloader because most sites give you download links that expire and don't tell you how long they expire. I've had download links expire in like 2 hours, some in 4 and I'm like this is so stupid. I went to bed with some running and only 3 finished and the rest all expired. If I had those running in a browser download I couldn't change out the URL and continue them, I'd have to cancel and start all over again. So they force me to run them through Jdownloader. I am going through doing captchas to get the download URLs twice, I am having to monitor the downloads and restart them, I am having to rename and organize the files. And while all that is going on, I get my account blocked and a message to contact support. I contact them and they say too many connections from different IPs, we'll turn it back on, try now. It's because I use a VPN and jdownloader will sometimes load it with multiple connections to keep the download going. A lot of them know this and discourage Jdownloader because of it but if you don't use JDownloader they expect you to download 1 at a time and wait until it's done to do another. It would be your full time job essentially to sit there doing that. The way it is designed is they are getting a lot of support messages for download issues, streaming issues, login issues, etc. Some of it might not even be on their end. If the person already bought lifetime and you just let them pay extra for a hard drive shipped to them with the files, you eliminate a lot of that hassle with all the support and security costs associated with it.

5. It will increase lifetime membership sales
When I consider buying a lifetime membership, the first thing I wonder is can I download everything I want in a month without having to do that and just pay for a discounted monthly membership and cancel? The answer is usually a yes. The next question I ask is how long do I think this studio will be around, could they get shut down, go out of business or could they possibly just branch off with a new membership site and put all their new content on that one, screwing me over in a few years? The answer is possibly. In the end it usually comes down to me choosing the hassle of trying to cram download in everything I want during my monthly subscription time and cancelling. If you do that a few times, you know you'll need hard drive space and you need backup hard drive space, and you need to manage all those downloads. It's a real pain and hassle. So in the end, it comes down to a monthly and time to download or no sub on your site at all. I'll just not use your service. Now lets say they offer a monthly with the option to upgrade to lifetime with a hard drive option. I sign up for a month to try it out, I stream a few first to see how many I like and I realize I like 300 titles, and 150 of those I easily want to keep or download. I do the math and am like that would take this much hard drive space, it would take a lot of bandwidth and time, I think I'll just upgrade to lifetime with the hard drive option and have them send me the whole catalogue.

6. It will increase membership sign ups
Lets say 20 websites offer a lifetime membership with a hard drive upgrade option to have a hard drive mailed to you with the download files for your device of choice. I am trying to decide which one I should choose to register on, I am most likely going to choose the one with the hard drive option. I will do like above and start with a monthly and see what it's like and gauge how many I want to download and if it can be done in that month or if it's worth just upgrading to the lifetime with hard drive sent to me option. It will certainly increase membership sign ups because it's so convenient to know you can have it sent to you if you like most of the videos.

7. If other websites start doing this one day, you'll have to do it too so you can compete
A lot of these 4k-7k video file download and streaming sites are getting into massive file sizes for download and streaming. I think it's only a matter of time before hard drive options become available. The companies that start it first and perfect the process will be ahead of the others. They will have their hard drives with distributors first and will be the first to get all the press write ups and attention on doing something new and different and reporting on what the results have been from it. If more follow along, eventually consumers will expect and want the service and your site will likely have to do it too so you can compete but now you are behind everyone and might have lost a lot of revenue and memberships along the way. Because why sign up on your site when they have the hard drive mailed to you options on others. If I sign up I am going to try to review and check out as much of the catalogue as possible before my membership expires and that is a lot of work. It would be nice to know I have the lifetime upgrade with hard drive option. The question then is where do you want to be when it happens or do you think it ever will happen. 16k VR will be coming next and the current file sizes are already 25gb. Are we going to get to 50gb files yet you are still going to service all those lifetime memberships with it? Better fire up a hard drive distribution plan to get ahead of these future file sizes that might be coming.

Cons
1. Fear or risk it will increase piracy
If someone wants to pirate, they are not going to purchase a lifetime, that is more the behavior of someone who wants to support the studio and also finds the value in having their service that long. Someone pirating is likely to buy a monthly subscription and download a bunch and pirate it that way. The concept is the only way you get to purchase the hard drive option is to purchase it with a lifetime membership that the studio already sells. Someone pirating is going to try to spend the least amount possible to nothing. They will spend more on their internet to download it all in a month and pirate it. Someone with a monthly could do all the pirating they want and won't need a lifetime sub to do it. So all you do is hurt the lifetime sub people and lose revenue on selling more of them by offering such an incentive.

2. You fear it could destroy/end your studio having your entire catalogue out there
What you could do is put a certain amount of titles in the bundle deal. If you have a large catalogue, chances are you might not be able to get it all on a 14tb hard drive anyways. So you can pick some of your key titles and label them as core videos and those that have that label on your website are what are on the hard drive. These might be the videos you started the site with and have the best reviews. From there the lifetime streaming membership is more for all the new titles after that maybe you don't put on a hard drive. What you did was then save someone from having to comb through and decide on what to download on the core. They now just have them all on a hard drive. You don't have your entire catalogue out there, just select titles you grouped for your hard drive distribution.

3. The studio will lose revenue giving away their catalogue on a hard drive
As someone mentioned, they are banking on someone buying the lifetime membership and not downloading TB of their catalogue but I seriously doubt that is the reality. If you just spent $250-$300 on a lifetime membership, would you download less than 2-3 TB? Or would you just go, yeah I'll just stream it, I don't care to download it. I couldn't imagine anyone not trying to get their money's worth and downloading at least a few TB of scenes. So ultimately they are going to download a large portion of the catalogue, maybe it isn't right away, but it will likely happen and you will have all the support and time commitments associated with servicing them in that long journey. And in the end you end up in the same place but you spent more money and time to get there. And on top of that they will be less happy with the overall experience and towards your company.

4. Some people don't download and just stream
First off they don't have to buy the upgraded hard drive option, they can still get just the lifetime membership. But you have to ask yourself why do some people just stream and not download? Maybe they bought the lifetime because they don't want ongoing subscription charges showing up on their credit card that their wife can see. Maybe they are a bit paranoid about all that. Maybe they don't download much because they aren't computer savvy or don't want to deal with the hassle of it and figure the lifetime gives them enough time to just slowly stream it like Netflix.

5. It would cost money to manage the hard drives/transfer to them/handle RMAs
You could start the service and see how it goes and access the costs and depending on what they are, could add on a service fee for the hard drive service. So instead of $300 for the hard drive, maybe it's $350 and the service fee is $50. Or you just eat the fee in the yearly membership. I see yearlys go from $300 to $250 to $200, they are always marking them down with big sales. Maybe you just have to pay full price for the yearly with the hard drive option and that helps to cover the cost of managing the hard drives.

Edited by - rocco on 10/1/2021 2:51:38 PM

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Be well

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P.S: Sorry for derailing the thrust of the thread. I tend to think that it's a bad business decision because unscrupulous individuals would buy those drives and then upload it to the net. Of course those same individuals can just join a site and basically do the same but most sites have safeguards on members downloading their entire library in short amount of time that wouldn't exist if they sold their library on drives.

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1. HDDs get expensive. High-capacity storage is in high-demand by businesses that use them for servers/NAS/workstations and the larger capacities cost a lot of money to buy, which destroys the profit margins. There are frequent shortages and supply difficulties in the HDD storage industry because of the demand for high-capacity drives.

2. You have to have external USB 3.0/3.1/3.2 cases for the drives. This too is expensive, as only the older USB 2.0 and eSATA cases are inexpensive now.

3. Shipping. It costs money and HDDs can get damaged. Again, money, money, money.

4. It costs a lot of time to copy files to an HDD and multiple drives require a lot of PC hardware to copy, copy, copy. In order to copy files quickly, you need a fast computer with SSD storage and a lot of RAM to handle the data transfers. Again, money, money, money, and more money! You also have to verify the file transfers to ensure the HDD doesn't have corrupted data.

If you attempt the same thing with a USB flash drive, it's certainly workable, but you'd have to use a lot of cheap USB 3.0 flash drives - which you can easily buy in bulk - to maintain any real profit margin. and it would still consume a lot of time for file copying and such.

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Lets say the only way to get one is to buy a lifetime streaming/download membership ($300) + the cost of hard drive ($300) = $600 + shipping cost.

$300 lifetime membership x 300 order = $9,000 a month x 12 months = $108,000 a year. The customer eats the cost of the hard drive cost and shipping. If any are damaged, you just RMA them back to the manufacturer of the hard drive which usually gives you a 2-3 year warranty on the hard drive.

The hard drives that are filled up and not sold can also be packaged and shipped to distributors like AdultDVDEmpire as a ready to ship hard drive with lifetime membership bundle.

All you are doing is transferring the files to a hard drive and letting it run, boxing it up and shipping it. Yes it is some work, but so would be servicing 300 lifetime members a month that are streaming and downloading and having downloading, streaming, tech related issues. If anything you've saved them the trouble with all those downloads/streams so it should greatly reduce your tech related issues, streaming and download costs, etc. It's a proactive approach that also puts the highest quality content out there with your customers so they can view and review more of your stuff. It makes it easier to view it and takes away all that added hassle that sets expectations even higher I think. Plus nobody does it, so you really get to stand out and can use it for marketing. If it doesn't work, you just cancel or stop selling them. You start with a few and see how it goes.

Edited by - roccovr on 10/5/2021 11:18:50 PM

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