I find it absolutely ridiculous that the ONLY way to use the device is with watching the movies. Yeah I'm sure the movies make the experience that much better but at 1$ a minute the cost will add up FAST! Why can't you just plug it in and start railing away at it without the movies? Does anyone else forsee this as a HUGE HUGE problem like myself? I mean we are in a recession I don't need a $500 a month bill to jack off ya know?
Hi!
I understand your concern very well.
I'd say, it's in Realtouch folks interest to make it available to use with no videos, or there's a good chance, somenone else will
Wellcome to the forum!
Im with ya on that one, the pay by the minute will keep me from getting the device. The fact that you must be connected to the internet, and have to log in to a site and then buy time is to much trouble. And thats after I paid for and now own the device.
I'm planning on getting one, but I'm very concerned about this too - I've posted on this topic before, but I just think $1.00 a minute is just too much for a device like this. I can pretty much assure you it's going to limit how much I use the device for sure.
AEBN's Video On Demand rate (JUST VOD - no interactivity) are actually quite reasonable when you buy a package and one of the better values. I did the math in another post, but it can go as low as less than 10 cents a minute as I recall. Now, I do understand something like this device costing more than regular VOD, but that's over an 1000% increase.
I'm hoping they offer the following:
- Minute Packages where the more you buy, the cheaper it gets. They do this with their plain old VOD service, and it's actually worth it as it drastically reduces cost.
- It'd be nice if they gave all buyers some free minutes every month, even if it's just 15 or something.
- It'd be nice if you could BUY movies outright to use with the device so you could download them and replay them forever.
That said, it's a USB device. There's no doubt in my mind techies will learn how to get into it and design software that allows use of the device without the videos, but it'll take time. That said, I think AEBN would be smart to develop their own application early (and they could charge a one-time fee for it) to take advantage of the device anytime without videos. Just a control panel letting you choose sensation (anal, oral, vaginal, etc.) and speed and maybe some special functions (like squirting lube or a random function). And if they were really ambitious, they could allow it to record routines (a little like you can do with electrostim) that people with the software could share with each other.
I tested this out a month or so ago to see just how much using the Realtouch 100%, without any traditional porn would cost me. So I got the AEBN package, 80 some dollars for 1000 minutes. Before the month had even finished, I had used up all my minutes. This is fine, for the selection and variety AEBN gives you, $80 for a month is not a bad deal and I'll probably continue to go there from now on (though I've started using free porn again as well). However, at $1 a minute, that month would've cost me $1000 dollars using the Realtouch. This is not acceptable. Perhaps I watch more porn than the average guy, but even just watching 15 minutes a day would have your bill hovering around $500.
If they just arranged it so the Realtouch integrated seamlessly into the AEBN site, but all enabled videos came at a premium price (something the AEBN site already has where some content burns minutes two times as fast) then I think that would be a still pricey, but reasonable amount to pay, considering the enhanced experience you'd be getting. If I have to pay $1000 a month though, you can forget about it, that's not even close to being worth it to me.
The problem is that in order to use content we have to have the rights to it. So we can't "sell" content in the sense of making a DVD or download to own. We can only stream it because we are adding things to it. Now add in the cost to make the content haptic costs and studio cuts and our hands are tied. However this is bound to change as we get more content and more and more studios become interested the price is bound to lower....don't hold me to that those are just my thoughts.
Also I wouldn't be surprised to see some type of "premium" code to use the device with out video however much you want.
now that i have tested the product it is like WOW but at 1.00 a minute thats the price of the average crack head bj so it would be better if AEBN could sell you a downloadable file for you to keep like a 20 min scenes for 15.00 dollars to keep or so you could trade or resell the to other real touch users
I don't buy that this is the way it has to be, there were other and still are other devices out there that do the same thing and you paid for the device and then you could buy as many videos as they had available for keeps. And now that the price is 200, your not that far under the other devices... and yes they use the real feel stuff also.
Not to be overly defensive but please show me a device that does the same thing? How much does webcam service cost? How about phone sex? I understand the gripe...I mean I certainly do but I can see from both sides so I understand a little better.
Jerj, mind if I ask what device this is you're referring to? I've never seen anything else like RealTouch yet personally (though I'm sure more are bound to come).
I am disappointed to hear that download-to-own is not going to be an option (at least initially). I understand the rights argument, but it's just frustrating, as this would have *seemed* an easy way that users could pay a one-time fee for unlimited use of the device (even if was always the same; or hell, a user could buy a new movie every month or two months and expand their personal collection). I would strongly encourage AEBN to try to work out some sort of arrangement that would allow this. OR, alternatively, they could *keep* it streaming, but allow you to "purchase" a title and have unlimited access to it in your account. That would solve, one would imagine, the licensing concern as users still could not download the videos or burn them; only play them on the site logged in.
The main issue I'm seeing, looking at it from a consumer point of view, is what Phetter said. $80.00 for 1000 minutes (over 16 hours) seems like a very good value to me (and for me lasts quite a while, but I tend to watch porn in short spurts [pun not originally intended]). I don't end up really worrying about my minutes it's such a good value in fact. If I were to buy, say, 8 porn DVD's (around 2 hours each), it would cost me probably 4X that, and I have an almost limitless selection of streaming content with AEBN, so it's something that I'll keep subscribing to again and again.
$1.00 a minute, however, no matter how you slice it, does *not* seem like a good value, even with what RealTouch offers. I realize a lot went into this device and the haptic programming for the videos, and I don't doubt that at all, but I worry that RealTouch is going to really choke its sales when people find out the price-per-minute. Most people, I feel, are going to be attracted by the "cost of entry" (even at $200.00, I feel its a pretty good value as sex toys go), but these same people will *not* be able to afford it once they learn the per-minute-price no matter how good it is. Sure, there will be some people with lots of disposable income who might, but a lot of people just won't be able to justify the price or simply can't afford the price.
To be perfectly honest, I'd much rather a higher initial cost and low content price than vice versa. Just as an analogy, imagine Apple offering their latest, greatest, highest capacity iPod for $29.99, but charging $4.99 per song instead of 99 cents. Even if the iPod was the only portable MP3 player of its kind and the only way to take your music with you, I don't think people would pay that for the music. And that's my fear with RealTouch.
The other way to get around this, instead of raising initial cost, would be the minute packages I already touched on earlier. (As an example, the price for individual minutes at AEBN is much higher if you buy 15 minutes at a time instead of the 1000 minutes all at once...I think it may even be triple off the top of my head) I find the "buy a lot of minutes at once" packages at a great price idea preferable to a higher device cost because you still have the relatively low cost of entry AND hopefully perceived value for money in terms of minutes, PLUS AEBN would tend to get larger purchases at one time. Good for everybody.
I don't know the definitive answer, and I hope RealTouch does well for AEBN and develops a broad audience. But I am worried about everything I'm hearing about the pricing model discouraging customers. I know personally speaking, if it's a flat $1.00 a minute no matter what, I may use the device occasionally, but I definitely won't spend the amount I likely would if the minutes were cheaper. It'd just be too discouraging to try to enjoy the device and worry the whole time how quickly I'm burning up my minutes.