CamLife Company Spotlight Terpon Reloaded

Terpon Reloaded: Hermes VR Cameras are Now Accessible By 100% Of TheLive CamAudiencewithout the need for headsets.  

 Whether it was the move to VHS from film, the dominance of mobile media over desktop content, live streaming overshadowing prerecorded video, or a list too long to write that would cover all the innovations in hosting, payment processing, and cinematography –Adult is almost always there first, and the rewards are tremendous. Now two of the most prominent buzzwords are being combined, as VR Webcams became available, thanks to the intensive work of innovating companies. We sat down with the Terpon team to learn more about their path through the past and into the future.

During the recent WTF summit in Russia, you created the excitement and attention that raised the interest of everyone there by disclosing that Virtual Reality is now accessible to 100% of the audience. Can you tell us more?

From top influencers to tech-users, almost everybody agrees that Virtual and Augmented Reality is about to shift our world and will contribute to reconnect people and their environment together by digitally enriching all our daily tasks. The big question is when will this happen?

For Terpon, since its inception, content has always been seen as the key into the resolution of the current VR chicken-and-egg status quo, and adult entertainment will be essential to that democratization quest as it is reaching the interest of most of the people all around our world. More content of interest will incentivize more users to buy headsets, more VR headsets will encourage more content creation.

Today, we are not saying something different, but, we are admitting we were wrong on our communication and approach: the future success of VR live cam is not residing into the chicken-and-egg dilemma’s resolution, but, into the clear understanding of what aVR camera can really deliver right now without any compromise: a native digital pan, tilt, and zoom (PTZ) functionality.

To better illustrate this, we can compare what happened during the transition between VHS tapes to DVDs. No one was thinking about losing the customers who were not yet equipped with DVD players, everyone was just producing on both mediums until the extinction of the first one became obvious. It should be the same with VR cameras; it can broadcast a standard 2D video stream that can be watched by all customers without any VR headset requirement.

In fact, it is even better as this transition is bringing by itself tremendous benefit for the users at almost no cost for the broadcasters. It is now possible to remotely manipulate the point of view and reframe the video the way you want. Which for live content is far more interesting than for recorded content that has been purposely framed by a director. Imagine that you can give the control individually to all the users or especially to the “king” of the room who is paying more to take that control. Imagine you can play with interactive toys at the same time and allow clients to focus on what is their most exciting view. There is no doubt you will find ways to increase their involvement and your revenues…

It is so frustrating that during the last two years it was there in front of us, and it never occurred to me that it was way more than a non-essential sub-functionality, Digital PTZ is the feature that will make all the difference.

Now, Terpon is actively developing easy to integrate software solutions to enable this level of interactivity in a live cam performance.

So, to your question, I can answer yes, 100% of your customers will be able to enjoy a 2D HD quality show with additional freedom and interactivity when you will perform in front of our Hermes cameras.

Are you saying that VR headsets are useless?

Not at all, I am just saying that instead to consider PTZ functionality as an option; and we see VR as a privilege to those who already own such devices. In fact, we strongly believe that thanks to this approach, it allows us to reach 100% of your audience and the fact that we are about to distribute 1,000 cameras will create that critical mass to enable VR headset acquisition as this has never been done in the past. To encourage this, we will offer soon a PPS affiliate program where models, studios and/or sites will be rewarded on promoting headsets to their hundred-million viewers. The potential of revenue is real, but it will have to be addressed wisely as many from this audience are not willing to pay on an Adult site. Our approach will be therefore to redirect to a custom mainstream platform which we are currently in the process of creating.

Understood, in which case what is the difference between your new PTZ functionality in light ofChaturbate’s PanCam experience launched mid-2017?Ref.: https://www.xbiz.com/news/221106/chaturbate-introduces-pancam-open-beta

The idea to remotely maneuver a camera is undoubtedly interesting as it contributes to increasing the final user involvement and therefore its satisfaction and retention. Unfortunately, current platforms latency induced awful effects. Indeed, the time it takes for a final user’s action to be gratified with an observable positive effect is often reaching 10 seconds or more. When dealing with tip and sex toys it is already annoying, but when it comes to manipulating a camera it just becomes impossible. 

With our viewing solution, the manipulation is on the global hemispherical image so the PTZ function is achieved in real-time on the stream. Camera motions are therefore smooth, precise and easy to control from fingertips or your mouse. We do not see any technical difficulties to adapt our solution to the one you have mentioned in your question if it is requested by the said campsite or its users.

Moreover, we can propose “Theia”, our new WebRTC management solution, to the sites that would like to step into the new broadcasting era and a way to contribute to a significant reduction in latency, in fact, we can approach light speed connectivity. As for example, we can currently obtain 3K/4K bi-directional live video communication below 100ms across the Atlantic.

Sounds like you offer a lot more than just the VR Cameras?

Yes, we have worked a lot on many different topics that converge to the resolution of the challenges that Live VR is facing.

Latency is one of them, as to create a perfect immersive experience you need to provide a real-time interaction, especially when in one-to-one private sessions where a client is using his voice to communicate with the model. As said, we have now a reliable and efficient solution that we offer for free to the site who are working on our integration. 

Bandwidth and bitrate limitation is also an issue we must face as VR content requires to transmit a lot of data. For that, we have partnered with a fast-growing company in the mainstream that has developed a new encoding technology called“Perseus” that enables reduction by 50% to 70% of the size of any video without requiring massive computing capability.

 And finally, we also have investigated a lot in the haptic technologies to develop a new generation of connected toys that will go beyond all of what you know as of today. As for us, it can’t be possible to imagine a global emotional and sensorial experience without interacting with all our senses.

But this is a story we will be pleased to tell you more about a few months…

All of this looks great, but how do you explain that it took so long for you to bring these cameras to the market when many were waiting for them? Don’t you think it is too many hooks and lines in the water? And what to expect from Terpon now?

Firstly, I would like to apologize to the ones who supported us from the beginning and who were so eagerly waiting for the Hermes launch. It is fair to ask such questions. I assume total responsibility for this delay.

As you underline it, we received a great and enthusiastic welcome over 2017. What I can say is that even if a few have momentarily decided to walk away, more every day are reaching out to us to ask for our solution.

To answer your first question, several factors have delayed our global launch, but the most important one is that I have totally underestimated the inertia of the industry.

 As a new-be and in reference to what we have already covered previously in this interview, I was believing that this industry will be very proactive and will adapt fast to all new cutting-edge solutions. As a global industry is true that the Adult Entertainment is a powerful vehicle for innovations, but as a matter of fact when you are paying more attention you discover that many of the ones who were successful are unwilling to question and change their approaches: “Why to change something that works!”That’s the reason why the big players in the printed charm magazines have failed and went bankrupt. That is also the reason why live cam site owners are for many of them, newcomers, compared to the ones who made a fortune in the recorded content, and why now the VR revolution is supported again by new players.

We were believing that focusing only on delivering a plug-and-play good quality VR camera will be enough and that all the platforms will internally develop their own VR viewing solutions now VR development language such as Unity are becoming commodities. Most of them did it with Flash and maybe it is also part of the problem as now it is an obsolescence platform that can’t perform with real-time telepresence systems.

Our cameras were ready to assemble in Q2-2017 as forecasted and have been delivered to some sites’ labs over Q3-Q4 2017 as promised. Just that to develop the new environment and find additional solutions means also more liquidities and it happened that simultaneously, Valerie and I were facing a shortage in our liquidities due to an independent event from Terpon itself. As we were the main investors in the project at that time, even if we had invested over a million dollars ourselves, we had no choice than to slow down the business, regroup our human resources, and recruit new highly qualified talent to manage successfully all our debts. Since then, we have brought over $1.2m more into the business with a successfully oversubscribedReg.D round, we have found software solutions for the platforms, discussed some major M&A, and more importantly, we finally can afford the delivery and the support for our first batch of 1,000 cameras.

So, our strategy is not defocused at all, we are just dedicated to building and providing a global and profitable ecosystem to the benefit of all the live cam players. What you can expect next is a lot of fun for 100% of your users and additional revenues for you.

We are doing business FOR the industry and WITH the industry.

When saying this are you alluding to opening your capital to the performers and the studios as we heard about that possibility from a few of your well-known partners?

You’re well informed! As you are saying, it is a possibility we are exploring as we believe in leveraging businesses with sharing upside opportunities with the one who contributes the most to their success. Why not imagine in the following years a sex-tech company to go public on the main stock exchange?

The potential is here. The Sexual Wellness market is already the size of the business-jet industry or the digital tablet industry and is still rapidly growing… Solo-sexuality among the millennial and following generation is not anymore a myth but a strong trend that will reshape the industry now taboos are falling one by one, country per country.  

I will be proud if Terpon becomes one of the leading companies in that sphere, but a lot of steps have to be achieved before that. Helping you to give new degrees of freedom and interactivity to your enthusiastic customers our current mission. Being in the first to propose our new PTZ functionality will give you a serious advantage over your competitors.

Thanks for your time, it was a pleasure to meet you today and hopefully we will learn more about that investment opportunity very soon. 

Was my pleasure as well, stay tuned and by the end of this month, I promise you that you will have all the details in regards to that investment opportunity.