At Kink.com, a live tool against piracy

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If Kink.com's experience with its first live broadcast on March 17 is any indication, that rule of thumb still holds true today. Live broadcasts are hardly novel, of course. Webcam doyenne Jennifer Ringley pioneered the updated-every-few-minutes JenniCam more than a decade ago, and adult sites like Webcams.com and Sexcams101.com have taken Webcam salaciousness to its logical and mostly uninteresting conclusion. A Webcam stripper is even a main character in NBC's popular Heroes television show.

But most of those videos, like the tiny streams from CNN.com or FoxNews.com, are displayed at an embarrassingly grainy resolution of some 70,000 pixels. Although the audio is clear enough, miniscule onscreen windows can be painful to watch. High-definition content that's encoded in 1080i, on the other hand, has a resolution of 1 million to 2 million pixels, depending on what method of counting is used.

"I haven't actually seen live high-def streaming elsewhere."

--Peter Acworth, Kink.com founder

Kink.com's inaugural HDTV broadcast relied on an intricate and fragile chain of computer hardware, some 30 components in all. "It required some black magic," said Jeff Schnitzer, Kink.com's chief technology officer.

Three high-definition video feeds were mixed into streams that were piped to the Internet through Windows Media Server boxes and watched by about 300 people who could also join a live chatroom. About two-thirds selected the live 1080i stream, which required a 1 megabit-a-second link. Because of the complexity involved, the job required 11 Kink.com workers, including camera operators, technicians, Webmasters and two models, one of whom seemed to spend most of her time typing on a laptop from within a metal cage.

An important requirement is to minimize latency, the delay between when a customer types a request and the video result appears on their computer. The live shoot had a latency of less than 20 seconds, and the company is trying to find ways to reduce it even further. "If they're typing 'spank her harder' and it takes 30 seconds, that doesn't feel live," Schnitzer said. A second live broadcast is scheduled for next Friday.

Networking at the 'Porn Palace'

Creating and maintaining a network that can handle live high-definition video is no trivial task. Kink.com has a fiber link running from its main office--called the "Porn Palace"--to a data center operated by 365Main. Two 1-gigabit links connect the company's servers at the 365Main site, which can hold 50 terabytes of data, to the rest of the Internet.

Schnitzer, the CTO, says an upcoming project will create a duplicate data center in Amsterdam that has a mirrored copy of all the data. "In case the legal climate here were to ever change, we could flip a switch," he said.

Prosecution is a concern of any adult business, from movie theaters to strip clubs, but so far the U.S. Department of Justice has not launched the kind of aggressive Internet crackdown the industry feared when George W. Bush became president six years ago. Although one hardcore California video distributor, Extreme Associates, is facing obscenity charges, federal prosecutors have mostly spent their time targeting child pornography instead. The Child Online Protection Act remains in legal limbo.

The threat of obscenity prosecution "seems to have evaporated," said Kink.com founder Acworth.

Kerfuffle over National Guard armory

As fetish sites go, Kink.com is practically buttoned-down. It has strict rules of conduct and about 40 percent of its employees are female. In addition, the company offers benefits, including health, dental, vision and a 401K plan with employer matching. It proudly counts itself as part of San Francisco's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community and its employees send a float to the annual Burning Man art festival in the Nevada desert.

That float currently is stored in a corner of the massive drill court of what used to be the San Francisco National Guard Armory, which Kink.com quietly bought for $14.5 million last December. What looks like a Moorish castle in San Francisco's Mission District has been vacant for nearly 30 years, after neighborhood activists blocked efforts at the height of the dot-com bubble to turn the 200,000-square foot building into office spaces for start-ups. They also opposed plans to turn it into a telephone switching station. (Because it's on the National Register of Historic Places, it can't easily be razed.)

When Kink.com announced that it had bought the armory and planned to use its dank, decaying basements to film bondage scenes, even famously liberal San Francisco started to become squeamish. Neighborhood activists wrote opinion articles in the San Francisco Chronicle decrying "degrading images of men and women." Street protests took place. Mayor Gavin Newsom demanded public hearings on the matter.

After a brief public kerfuffle, however, not much changed. Acworth took pains to reassure skittish San Franciscans that there would be no garish signs on the outside of the building announcing Kink.com's presence, and promised to clean up the armory, which had grown filthy with disuse and is poorly lit at night.

Acworth has plans to outfit the armory with industrial-strength lighting gear (a 1200-amp lighting box has already arrived) so he can rent it out to Hollywood studios looking for a place in San Francisco to film. He envisions the top floor eventually becoming residential units, the second floor being used as Kink.com offices, and the basement remaining largely as-is and being used to film dungeon and boiler-room scenes for Kink.com sites.

By showing that adult videos can co-exist with mainstream movies, Acworth seems to be laying the groundwork for an infiltration of sorts. "I think it's only a matter of time before some tamer bondage appears on cable TV," he said. "Part of my goal, in addition to make money out of this, is to make kink thought of as OK."

[chelbe00]

Sad

Its really pathetic that we have a need for pornography. Sadly it shows how anti-sexual we've become. Silly how we rather watch others engage in sex that be an active participant. We should hook up more and get rid of this need to be a voyeur.

[J. Blow]

HIstory lesson

Porn has been around since the begining of recorded history. It clearly isn't going away and is in some fashion ingrained in human behavior.

[Dachi]

Funny

"Silly how we rather watch others engage in sex that be an active participant. We should hook up more and get rid of this need to be a voyeur."

-Says chelbe00 from a CNET forum.

The "hook up" culture is as as prominent now as ever. If it isn't more prominent now it is at least more out in the open.

[HandGlad2]

I'm confused...

Is this preventing piracy just because it's a value-added incentive that is only available to legitimate customers? (So, only the 300 people in the chat room could suggest, "Spank her harder")

I don't see why someone couldn't simply record the feed as it was being streamed to their computer, and share it later as they pleased.

[J. Blow]

1080i?

why not shoot in 720p? monitors don't display interlace. Are they assuming it is being played back only on TV's that do?

[SamoUmer]

no interlace

1080i either stands for 1920*540 at 60 frames/sec OR 1920*1080
at 25 frames/sec.

[Sandra_Kerns]

Porn Star! Try Porn filth :(

How can you call these people/women who appear in these videos Porn Stars!
They are at best 2 bit dirty hoe :(
Who have sold their soul for a mere few Hundred dollars to $2000 max.
A movie star, gets like $5Mill per movie, these miserable lost women who appear in these videos where they are depicted as less than animals, or
objects, get paid usually at most $2000.
How can you glorify this filthy act, of appearing in a porn video set aside making it and disturbing it as anything but a sad and pathetic act for sad and pathetic people who buy them. Specially what this kink.com makes which is bondage videos.
For example in one series of videos they have women "Hog tied" ramming blunt objects into their vaginas by machines! How can you glorify the outfit and people who make these filth?
Let me ask you this, if your daughter or mother appeared in one of these porn videos at kink.com, would you consider her a "Porn Star"? Or would you consider that she has ruined your life since beside degrading herself to the level of slime, she has also degraded her whole family to that level.

[chelbe00]

not the issue

The issue isnt that they are getting paid. The fact is that other sex workers get paid but its illegal because they dont use a camera during the sex act. Consider the government says its a matter of free speech to have sex on camera, but its illegal to pay someone to have sex. The reason is simple, porn controls our sexual desires and pornographers take advantage of this.

We as a society are to blame, not the pornographers. If we really wanted sex, we could eliminate porn. But we dont want to since we rather watch others--which is more obscene. We need to turn the tables on them by not watching the crap they produce, hookup, and have more sex. We really dont need their crap if we legalized prostitution, permitted the establishment of sex clubs and were more open to each other. But that wont happen..we are phoney as they are.

[boyKyle]

You have one thing right in your statement. They are not Porn Stars. Being familiar with people at kink.com and many of the models, I know they are not doing this for the buck. Almost all of these women are active in the BDSM community at large and do this more for fun than a paycheck. There are clubs all over the country where people do this without a paycheck for 100s of people to see, because that is WHO THEY ARE. So come on, step down from your high horse and cross over to the dark side. We Have Cookies

[fcekuahd]

Who the hell cares about piracy at Kink.com?

This is like posting armed guards at the sewage treatment plant.

[rob9567]

Piracy, a concern?

He cares so much about his crap being pirated, but he doesn't seem to care about the safety and health of the people in his crap films. Did you know that he bought a building called the Armory in San Francisco? He doesn't have to earthquake proof it or remove asbestos, lead or other toxic metals. But piracy is his concern. I guess the building falling down on his employees or breathing in toxic dust doesn't seem to warrant the concern.

[chelbe00]

On their demand

If hooking up is so much more common why do we still have this crap? Porn has been around for ages supposedly but not to the degree that we have now.

Also funny how the use of a video camera on people paid to have sex allows the producers to provide their workers with health benefits. Contrast that to the alleged illegal activities of other sex workers who simply do not appear on a camera to get paid to have sex. There is no regulation, no benefits. They are hung out to dry with government approval.


As for the producers mentioned who think that making a video live will reduce the threat of illegal copying of their "precious material" here is a question.

Have you ever considered how people use this? If you did you would know that the urge to watch and release is dependant on the level of need. So in their world, you wait till they turn on the camera, then you engage in that oh so solo activity. Its like you've gotten a real date with the camera.

[boyKyle]

Some of the first porn filmed on camera was a guy whipping a girl. This is human nature. Get used to it.

[lilmikesf]

Sorry Peanut Gallery But Porn Is Profitable & Your Comments A Waste Of Time

I don't know where most of the pedantic commentary is coming from...seems they are new to not only Cnet, but the concepts discussed in the article. Note how one blithering "commentor" brings in his assessment that somehow by buying SF's abandoned historic Armory as a studio, now the amiable Acworth is somehow a villian to those who work for him. Nothing could be further from the truth, and while the imagery may not be your cup of tea, it's created in a legal & taxed manner & done here creating work in the US. There's good news here in that you don't have to watch it if you don't want to, and that the anti piracy measures will likely keep you from seeing it, even if you want to. Those who can't grasp how his business has grown, or get over their own prejudice are sadly distracted by it none the less. Maybe they should work hard and achieve something as well, instead of sitting in the peanut gallery and whining about how others are getting ahead.