It’s no secret that the adult industry has struggled as a result of competition from tube sites. Sites like Pornhub, Redtube and Tube8, while beloved by consumers, have prompted the adult industry to descend into an economic tailspin, leaving performers and studio executives scratching their heads over how to monetize their content. Enter Skweezme (NSFW), a new online streaming platform that touts itself as “the Netflix of porn.”
Launched last Monday, Skweez is a new video-on-demand service with one simple yet herculean task: Getting people to start paying for porn again.
“The consumer mentality right now is that free porn is just a god-given right, and they don’t look at the production line,” Michael Kulich said. “What they don’t realize is that if everyone just watches for free, there’s gonna be no new content, and everyone’s gonna be watching the same clips over and over for the next 20 years.”
Co-founded by Kulich and Jamey Kirby, Skweez has been in development for the past two years. Its name comes from the innuendo-heavy Who song “Squeezebox,” as well as the concept of “squeezing your dollar and getting the most out of it.” Like Netflix, Skweez provides access to hundreds of streaming titles for a low price—99 cents for 24 hours of access.
“We’re the guinea pig—we’re taking the risk,” Kirby recently told the Huffington Post. “If we can’t convince people to pay a dollar for content, then we won’t be in business very long. But we’re banking on the hope that we can.”
Like Netflix, Skweez aims to provide a combination of original and studio content. Whether your tastes run more toward Fuck My Hairy Pussy or Tokyo Cougar Creampie 10, Skweez’s library has something to fulfill your needs—and unlike tube sites, there’s no malware or advertising to diminish the viewing experience.
The concept for a “Netflix of porn,” or an “iTunes of porn,” has been bandied about for years.
“In the late ’90s and early 2000s, music piracy was, in my opinion, more rampant than adult,” Kulich said. “But iTunes came in and said they were gonna make it even easier for people to get the content they want at a price they can afford, and they took a huge part of that piracy off the floor. We think we can do the same thing with the adult.”
But while some sites like VideoBox have realized success with a low-priced streaming platform, others like Extreme Entertainment Network and Fyre TV didn’t manage to take off, due to a lack of sufficient funding and studios’ reluctance to offer their content as such a low price.
With piracy continuing to gnaw away at the industry’s bottom line, however, Kulich thinks studio heads are coming around. Skweez has already managed to get 40 to 50 studios on board, with content providers receiving a portion of the revenue from the site’s monthly visits.
“If we came into the industry five years ago and said we wanted to make one platform with everyone’s content on it, and we wanted to charge 99 cents so someone could watch anything they want, no one would have agreed to license our content on it,” Kulich said. “But now with the majority of consumers watching everything for free, it’s really the only idea that people are looking at and saying, ‘This is something that could actually bring money back for the studios.’”
Skweez is also developing original content, including a 13-episode original series that Kulich describes as “The Real Housewives of San Fernando Valley,” with a mainstream producer attached to the project. The move to develop an Orange Is The New Black-type breakout series for a porn platform is part of the company’s larger effort to brand itself to a wider audience. And Kulich doesn’t necessarily see the audience as limited to hardcore porn fans.
“Netflix is all about branding itself, and that’s really our goal,” Kulich said. “We’d like to advertise to bridge that gap between the adult and mainstream with this product.”
Skweez is available on the web and mobile devices (it’s rolling out a version for Roku on March 1), but the ultimate goal is smart TV compatibility. That, however, won’t be easy. Streaming porn platforms have encountered resistance from mainstream smart-TV manufacturers, who fear that offering adult content could alienate consumers. Another potential roadblock for Skweez is competition from porn conglomerate Mindgeek, the owner of tube sites like Pornhub and Porntube, which is reportedly developing a Netflix-inspired platform of their own.
Yet the primary obstacle that Skweez faces doesn’t come from Mindgeek, or smart device manufacturers, or skeptical studio heads. It’s from consumers, who are so used to having a wealth of unlimited free porn at their fingertips.
H/T Huffington Post | Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III
