The VideoBox Blog

UPDATE: we missed 2 release dates, but got caught up right away. We apologize again for any inconvenience and will work hard to ensure that this dos not repeat. Thank you for your understanding, and your membership.

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Dear SOD Subscribers,

Just wanted to let you all know that due to logistical challenges with getting content from Japan to the USA, we are projecting that we will miss a couple of DVD update dates in the next week or so. We are very sorry for the inconvenience; we know how important it is to all of our members that new content hits the site on time. This is doubly true in the case of a channel upgrade, which costs an extra fee above the base membership price. Please rest assured that we have done everything in our power to prevent this from happening, but were unable to overcome the various obstacles we faced. We are also taking steps now to prevent this from ever happening again.

As soon as we have the content on our premises and encoded, we will begin posting double updates on each release day until we have caught up to the number of DVDs expected. I will also provide an update to this post as soon as we have more details for you all.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact customer support by clicking here to submit our web form.

More Soon,
Bob and The VB Content Team

Hey Everyone,

Today we are proud to announce the launch of our newest VBChannels: Elegant Angel and SOD (Soft on Demand)!

For years we have been trying to work out a deal to offer Elegant Angel on VideoBox. We have received countless emails asking for Elegant Angel and we are extremely excited that their content is now available to you all through the site.

SOD (Soft on Demand) is the top adult studio in Japan. A common request we receive is for more Japanese content, so we made a concerted effort to bring you the best there is.

For those who are interested in these channels, here are the details:

• 40 full DVDs available as of this writing, for each studio
• Elegant Angel – 3 DVDs added per week, including HD titles
• SOD – 4 DVDs added per week
• Elegant Angel is priced at $15/month
• SOD is priced at $35/month

We hope you enjoy these new studios. I’m sure you’ll find at least a few scenes or movies that interest you

Have fun!

It hardly seems possible that 4 1/2 years have transpired since part 1 of favorite VideoBox scene appeared on the blog, as well as 3 1/4 years since the part 2 follow-up. I do believe my all-time favorite VideoBox offering continues to be the scene (two scenes actually) I discussed in this article. However, with over 70,000 scenes on site, it’s quite difficult to isolate one particular favorite. In today’s post, I’ll present one of my favorite scenes which I haven’t previously discussed. I invite all within the membership to list your favorite VB scenes in a reply to the post, and I’ll link them up for easy accessibility.

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As many of you noticed, last week we changed the top content bin on the home page from “Newest DVDs” to “Recommended DVDs”. I’m writing this post to give some background on this decision.

First, I want to apologize about making this change without any communication. I know we made it confusing and less convenient for many people whose usage pattern is to check out the latest content.

So why did we make this change? A couple big reasons:

We want to display more relevant content

We have an archive of over 13,000 movies. Chances are, the last 5 DVDs added to the site will not appeal to you as much as 5 that we can recommend algorithmically.

Our recommendation algorithm is pretty good (though I think it can be a lot better). For one thing, it automatically chooses videos that you haven’t seen before. With over 13,000 DVDs, no one has seen more than a fraction of our library (that’s over 2 years of continuous 24/7 porn watching).

Our metrics confirm an increase in relevancy: after one week, we’ve seen a 9% increase in downloads since we promoted recommended over newest DVDs.

The world is *gasp* running low on new porn

There’s less porn being made these days. And much of it cannot be licensed without putting the content into designated premium channels.

Historically, our value proposition has been strongly linked to “5 new DVDs a day”. Because of changes to the external market, we can’t keep adding 5 DVDs a day forever.

So we need to reframe our value proposition to be more about overall quality of content that you experience, rather than simply what’s new.

I want to thank you for your patience and for being part of this site.
So far, there’s been an increase in downloads without an increase in cancellations, so I feel like these changes are moving us in the right direction. And things should only get better by improving our recommendations.

Thank you,
Josh

Hey Everyone,

Today we are proud to announce the launch of our newest VBChannel, an all-Transsexual channel known as Club Tranny!

Over the years we have found that there is a high demand for quality Transsexual content from many of our users. However, it is challenging to find great quality at affordable prices, and it can cause controversy if we post a lot of it within the standard daily updates. For these reasons, we are offering this optional stand-alone channel to satisfy the demand without adding a surplus of this content to VideoBox. This change will not affect existing Transsexual content on VideoBox, and we will continue the occasional non-channel Transsexual releases.

For those who are interested in this channel, here are the details:

• 40 full DVDs available as of this writing, with an additional 3 DVDs added each week
• Content from a diverse group of top studios, including Tranny Kingz, Trans Erotica and Gia Darling
• Regularly $20 a month, but discounted for a limited time to only $15 a month!

We hope you enjoy this offering if it interests you. And, if Transsexual content is not your bag, we hope you continue to enjoy your membership without concern that you will be weeding through a sudden increase in shemale videos.

Either way, have fun!

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.

Ever since David let the cat out of the bag back in January that Videobox is going to start having HD releases, it’s been a popular discussion topic on this blog, and in the customer service emails. It may seem trivial to simply add an HD title to the release schedule, but there were many wrinkles to iron out. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. The biggest issue being that many studios claimed to have full HD, but when we received samples from them it was actually only 480p. (Shocker – an adult company would embellish the description of their product…) So with all the hard work behind us, I would like to announce that there’s good news…and there’s really good news!


The Good News:
Videobox will start releasing one 720p HD title every day beginning in early March – hopefully the first week. Best case would be March 1st,, which is what we’re shooting for. Now if you’re wondering why I’m hedging (which I am a bit), it’s because the encoding process for HD is different from standard definition DVDs and we ’re still collecting the content from studios. Not to mention that this is a new process for them as well. But there are multiple hard drives traveling around the country right now and we’re feeling optimistic.


The Really Good News:
When we first started discussing having HD on VB last year, we knew that we didn’t want to roll it out with just any random content. We wanted it to look GOOD and have value to you by being differentiated with the brand, girls and production quality. The following studios; Wicked Pictures, Burning Angel, Zero Tolerance and 3rd Degree Films are the first group of studios that will be joining the VB HD family. All of these studios are known for their dedication to producing high quality original content that you now can see on VB





You will also start seeing some of the more popular Studios in HD as well:
New Sensations
Digital Sin
Diabolic
Harmony
Anarchy
Combat Zone


I probably shouldn’t throw this out there, but there is a strong possibility that we could get Anabolic Pictures in HD as well. That said, I’ve been trying to do a deal with them for 4 years, so if it falls apart again don’t ask, “where the fuck is the Anabolic?”

It’s the start of a new year, which means it’s time for our annual trek to Vegas for the Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE.) This is the biggest porn convention of the year, complete with red carpet AVN awards show. It’s also where we meet with content producers and put together our content plan for the year. From the comments in my last blog post, I know that some of you have very strong feelings about what movies should and should not be on the site, so I wanted to open up a forum for input and discussion.

To illustrate the challenges and nuances of licensing content, I want to point out a site that has the exact opposite licensing approach to VideoBox: AEBN.com. For those of you who aren’t familiar, AEBN was the first adult pay-per-view website. They now have over 70,000 movies from virtually every studio.

Sounds great, right? Here’s the catch: it’s really expensive. $20 per month gets you 200 minutes of viewing time—about 2 DVDs. And, that’s for streaming only. If you want to download and own a movie forever, it will cost you an additional $20 per DVD! But on VideoBox, if you download only one of the five new daily DVDs, you get 30 DVDs per month for about $15. To download the same amount from AEBN, you would have to spend $600. SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS!?!? That’s the price of a new computer!

We made a decision a long time ago to honor the fact that our customers liked a good deal, don’t want to be nickel and dimed per minute, hate DRM, and want to be able to download and archive their own movie collections. However, this model limits the studios that we license from, and that list changes every year. For example, we used to be able to license titles from Elegant Angel, but they changed their mind. There are some studios that we’ve been close to inking deals with—like Hustler and Devil’s Film— but that have never gone through. We want to give you the best content that $10 bucks a month can buy, but it’s challenging and we’re continually working to get new deals.

The good news is that because of the porn recession, studios are more aggressively looking for additional revenue streams and thus more open to licensing to VideoBox—I look forward to 2011 being an exciting year in content! As we prepare to head to Vegas, we’d like to get your input on where we should focus our efforts: If you have studios you’d like to see on the site, please post a comment. If there’s any particular DVD title that you’d like to see from any studio, please post that, too.

Lastly, something to consider: it would be possible for us to integrate the AEBN catalog into VideoBox, so that you could easily browse all 70,000 DVDs in the VB interface; with a one-click option, you’d be able to stream or download any movie. It would cost extra and it would be expensive (though maybe we could negotiate a special price for VB members). I’d like to get your feedback on this possibility, too: Let me know whether or not you’d like to see the AEBN catalog integrated into VideoBox by posting a comment. The core reason that we’ve haven’t built this feature in the past is to avoid the perception that “VideoBox has gone downhill and all the updates will be complete and utter crap forever more.” You might’ve read some of comments that claim that this has already happened at VideoBox, so we don’t want to add fuel to the fire.

I’d love to hear all of your thoughts and, as always, you can e-mail me at david@videobox.com. Just like the Hair Club for Men, I’m not only the president, I’m also a client.

It is my great pleasure to announce that The Content Dude has finalized a deal which will bring the Diabolic studio to VideoBox. Diabolic has a number of excellent series on their roster, and their titles are generally populated with superb female casts. Those of you unfamiliar with specific studios, can tell I’m excited by my use of the rarely seen quadruple exclamation point in the headline above. Full credit to The Content Dude and his outstanding team in the Content Department. To celebrate, we’re having a poll to decide which DVD will be the first posted. Please enter your vote among the titles listed below. I will close voting promptly at 10:00 PM Pacific time on Thursday 7/15/10. I expect the winning video to be uploaded on Friday 7/16/10, with the runner-ups to be uploaded over the weekend. The Content Dude has declared the upcoming weekend to be a Diabolic Weekend.

Click inside for full boxcovers and scene breakdowns.

The voting booths have now closed. As you can see, Spring Chickens #19 is the winner in a competitive race. The contest was very close through the middle stages, then Spring Chickens #19 gradually opened up its winning margin.

Spring Chickens #19 has now been uploaded. Get it while it’s HOT!

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I’m honored and thrilled to announce that The Content Dude has cemented a deal to bring the excellent studios of New Sensations and Digital Sin to VideoBox. All credit to The Content Dude and his team in the content department. To celebrate, we’re having a poll to decide which DVD will be the first posted. Please enter your vote among the titles listed below. I will close the voting at 11:59 PM Pacific time on 12/30/09. I expect the debut (winning) video to be uploaded on 1/1/10.

Look inside for full boxcovers and scene breakdowns.


The voting booths have now closed. As you can see, Point Blank P.O.V is the winner. Look for the DVD to arrive on the site 1/1/10.

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