The Agony of Video Content
Jo Hawke Copy Editor / Publicist - AEBN Inc.

You’ve a built nice little membership site and now you like to serve what all the other up-and-coming pay-sites have: Movies. So, what are your options? Well, you can always cut cost by making your own.

Making Your Own Movies
You break out your digital movie camera and decided 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 gon’na go out and BUY the damn movie. Hell, you’re gon’na go right on out and buy a whole friggin’ bunch of them -- or rather, the right 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 want to show…

Then you have to contact the studio, buy plane tickets to where ever they are, buy them lunch at a Nice restaurants to suitably impress them that you mean business, and then spend at least 4 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 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 (a 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 2 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 4 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, 8 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 240,00.00 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 360,00.00 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 a membership, how many would you have to sell to break even?

(Note to Self): Hmm… Breaking even is beginning to look like its going to require a membership be sold to every english speaking human on the planet. In addition to a fair share of those none-English speaking folks… So go ahead and hire that translator.

But wait – there’s more.
Cost of renting a building: 2500 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)

Lets 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 a membership, how many would you have to sell to break even NOW?

(Note to Self: Begin to think in terms of: the absolute global population over the next century - and your going see that “break even” point just over the horizon!

And finally
Cost of a really good accountant: One that doesn't cut 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 measly $99.00 a 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 had to do was drop a check in the mail.

Jo Hawke
Copy Editor / Publicist - AEBN Inc. - http://www.aebn.com
hawke@aebn.net 800-628-0241x157
ICQ - 27298016 AIM: AEBNNews MSN: AEBNNews/HotMail