The VideoBox Blog

Hi Everyone! I’m really excited to announce the imminent release of the new roku app! It’s been a little over a year since we released the first roku app, and I’ve received a lot of positive feedback, as well as a myriad of bug reports and feature requests.  I’ve done what I can to make this the best app possible. A few new features include:

• Parental Controls
• Search Capabilities
• Access to your DVD and scene stash
• Image galleries
• Plus more!

The new improvements are too numerous to list here, but pictures say a thousand words, so check out the screenshots I’ve attached below.

I will begin rolling it out to existing users over the next several days. So stay tuned, and check your roku for the update!

In the meantime, we’ve decided to give away some free rokus! I’ll be giving out ROKU2 XS streaming players to 5 lucky members. This is the top-of-the-line roku with gaming functionality, 1080p video and advanced wifi and ethernet (check out the specs here).

To enter, from VB click on MY ACCOUNT, then in the “Win a roku” section, click “send confirmation”. This will send a confirmation email to your account email address. When you receive it, just click the link in the email and you’re all set! I will announce the winners on May 27.

Below are some “sneak preview” screen grabs from the new roku app:

Hey VideoBoxers,

As some of you may have noticed, we launched a major update to VideoBox today. Most of the changes are on the back end, but here’s a list of new things you’ll see at www.videobox.com that we think you’ll love. It’s not a complete list, mind you — you may find some other gems as you click around. There will be more to come, and we know there may be some items in need of polish; more on that after the list.

• Category and Tag Filters: when you’re logged in, they’re on the left side of the results pages, and by popular demand, you can choose categories to exclude from your results set for DVDs and scenes!

• Profile Pages: if you click a fellow user’s name or avatar on a comment, or in the tooltip for a clip, you’ll be taken to their profile page where you’ll see their stats and a list of all the comments they’ve made. From there you can jump to a page of all the clips they’ve created, or all the content they’ve rated, grouped into DVDs, scenes and clips.

• Search: this now works the same as VB2, including a drop-down list to narrow your search, and it also has auto-complete for when you’re looking for something specific or which includes some portion of text that you already know.

• Avatar Picker: yes, you can now change your avatar from the auto-assigned one you have now to one of the 5,000 options we’ve pre-loaded! The “My Profile” link on the left nav of the “My VB3″ page takes you to your own comments and stats, and it has a link at the top to “Edit Your Profile” where you can choose a new avatar image and update your stats as well.

We know that some of this will change over time as we all use the site and as we incorporate your feedback and suggestions. We’re also aware that there may be items that didn’t translate exactly from our previous tech stack to this one: some pages might be slower than they were before, or display differently than they used to. I can assure you that we’re looking for those kinds of things, and if we know of an issue, we’re working on it. Please let us know in the comments below or on the Contact Us page if you find things that aren’t working right, or that you think could be improved. We are always grateful for your input, as it helps us serve you better.

Ultimately, we hope you enjoy this update and look forward to the changes to come. It’s a great feeling to know that we can now act more quickly and easily on bugs and new features.

Enjoy,
Bob

I’m sure most of you have already noticed, but for the few of you who don’t check the site daily, you may have missed two very exciting additions to the VB catalog: Jules Jordan and most recently, Anabolic. These deals have literally been in the works for years. Finally, after a lot of negotiation we walked away with hundreds of excellent titles from these two top tier studios. We are very excited to welcome Jules Jordan and Anabolic to the VideoBox family and I hope all of you enjoy the quality porn that’s coming your way.

Status Update On Search:

Just wanted folks to know that the broken Star Search has been fixed. There are still lots of search issues that need to be fixed. We know it. You know it. Please feel free to comment on specific search issues you are having here on the blog. The more helpful and courteous you are the more likely we can spin out some quick fixes. OK…..go!

We’re excited to announce that VideoBox has won the Adult Site Of The Year Award in the multi-genre category at the 2012 XBIZ Awards!

It is an honor to be nominated among such amazing sites, and an even bigger honor to have won in this category. Everyone here at VB is thrilled to win our very first XBIZ award. We would like to thank all of our members, content partners, and everyone who voted for us for making this possible.

We’re also especially thankful to XBIZ for recognizing us in such a distinguished category. We look forward to new partnerships and continued innovation in the new year.

Cheers!

When I started working at Videobox as a software engineer almost 2 years ago, I was really looking forward to working on mobile video.  The future was now.  Netflix on mobile was a year away.  Hulu on phones cost extra.  But I could see it coming.  What did we have to offer?  Not much, it turned out.  We had some sort of “beta” experiment going on, but it felt like an unfinished product.  I did sort of have the ability to watch porn, but just not my porn.  I wanted better.  It never passed what I called “the bathroom test”.

Introducing the new-new m.videobox.com!  Now you can see your complete stash of dvds, scenes AND movies!

The performance and video quality has been drastically improved.  And the UI has been fully tested on both Android and Apple devices.  No flash. Just great streaming video.  Anywhere.

Now With Video Format Switching!

The performance is going to be much better on WiFi connections as opposed to 3G cell networks.  I did my best to detect network latency and toggle between two formats, which are both encoded in H.264:

• WiFi Network Format: 640×480 @1200KBs
• 3G Network Format: 320×240 @300KBs

So pull out your phone and head to the bathroom.  You’ll be glad you did.  I guarantee it.

–Ben

Hey guys,

We’ve just launched a new site called VB PlayDates, and we’d love to get your feedback.

What is VB PlayDates?

VB PlayDates is a cams site where you can play games with girls.

You can play casual games, like checkers or pool. You can also share in adult activities, like watching porn together.

VB PlayDates is powered by a partner company called StripVille. We’ve worked to integrate our billing systems (just like with the existing VBCams site), so you don’t have to enter your credit card again.

Why did you create this site?

Adult social interaction is a growing space. You get a powerful thrill chatting with a real girl that non-interactive videos just can’t deliver.

But we didn’t want to just create another cam site. We wanted to create something new.

On most cam sites, you’re talking to girls in Eastern Europe or the Philippines, so language differences limit your interaction. Also, it’s unnatural to jump into a conversation with someone you’ve never met.

With VB PlayDates, most of the girls are American, and you can just play games with them, and allow a rapport to build organically.

That’s the idea, but it’s totally new and we’d love feedback.

What kind of feedback do you want?

At a basic level, what do you think of the site? Are you running into bugs? Usability issues? Did you like watching porn with the girls? How about the games?

At a deeper level, what do you think of the concept? What kind of adult social interaction would interest you?

Try VB PlayDates

Thanks,

- Josh

Hey guys,

We just launched several improvements to VB3.

The biggest change is searching now fills in options as you type

Other changes include:

• You can remove items from your stash in the same window you add them.
• Link to “scenes from your favorite stars” off the home page.
• Link to “recently viewed scenes” off the home page.
• You can now start playing the scene at time 0 when hovering over the thumbnail on the browse page.
• The info pop up when you hover over a thumbnail includes buttons to play, download, and stash directly from the browse page.
• We added a “play entire movie” button on the DVD pages.
• Various performance enhancements.

Please let me know if you’re seeing any bugs. Thanks, and I hope you enjoy these changes.

- Josh

There’s been a lot of talk about VB2 features missing in VB3 (and we’re bringing many of those back), so I wanted to share one of my new favorite ways of watching porn that’s only available on VB3.

If you add a bunch of stars to your favorites, you can watch all their scenes (sliced up into random moments) in flow mode. Here’s how you do it:

1) Go to the star page of your favorite stars, and add to stash:

2) Repeat step 1 for all your stars. I’ve got 58 stars in my list.

3) Go to your star stash folder, and click “watch in flow mode”:

Sit back and enjoy

Those 58 stars are in almost 4000 scenes, so this technique gives you lots of porn tailored to your taste.

I’d like to share some numbers, thoughts, and next steps that have emerged since launching VB3 last week.

Numbers

Conversion Rate

VB3 has improved our conversion rate of visitors to members by over 30%, and our cancellations have held steady. This is a dramatic improvement.

Before the launch of VB3, we were shrinking. Now, we are growing again.

Site Usage

Roughly 15% of our customers continue to use VB2 (i.e., they explicitly click “back to old site”).

Thoughts

We Have a Passionate Community

I started this company in 2002, and I’ve always strived to treat customers as I wanted to be treated. My goal was to create the world’s best site, one that people were happy to join.

When we launched VB3, we received a lot of negative feedback. I took this feedback – much of it from our most loyal customers – very personally.

There was a lot of internal debate on how to interpret all the messages we were receiving from our members. On one hand, we were getting more negative than positive feedback. On the other, the total number of people who complained was less than 1% of our members.

You Can’t Please Everyone

We have tens of thousands of members, and their tastes vary. There were also internal team dynamics and interests of content partners to consider.

What we ended up doing was spending the last few months ironing out the quirks in VB3, and making the site work more like VB2. The new site works pretty much like the old one. We considered doing a comprehensive redesign, but no one wanted to go through another 6-12 months of development time.

Next Steps

Continue to Improve VB3

Now that we’re past the painful hurdle of launching the new site, we’re going to keep improving it. In two weeks, you should see:

• Big changes to how search works.
• Fixes to the stash, such as the ability to add and remove items easily.
• Various performance improvements.

And looking beyond the next two weeks, expect to see a mobile / iPad optimized site.

Keep VB2 Around

We will continue to maintain VB2 for a while, at least until usage drops to single digit percentages.

Thanks,
Josh