This blog about the Babestation Xtreme and other encrypted babe channels is from the now defunct Tumbler account of @babe_tv and features their opinions on babestation’s live babeshows from the time of it’s original posting on Oct 1st 2013. We’re publishing it again now, as a nostalgic window into the history of our babe channels.
Take a look at Babestation’s current night shows and you’ll often see ads for something they call, ‘Pervcam‘. The internet based webcam service which acts as the naughty parallel world behind the gloss and regulations of the TV. Generally showing the babeshow babes at their most naked and daring. On the evidence i’ve seen this it doesn’t go half way to cover what is possible.
You can trace the marketing of this concept back through the history of the Freeview babe
channels to 2008 to the rise of Party Girls on channel 46 where cam facilities were a big promotion on Freeview’s first real sexual babeshow. Back then however it wasn’t promoted as a webcam show, but as a ‘3G’ service, though the principle was much the same. The term ‘3G’ related to people’s web connected phones and there was another alternative to connect online and follow a ‘Cam Chat’ link. Users could choose to set up ‘cam to cam’ offering a to way link their cam so the cam model can see them or if they prefer to communicate via text, there is a message box to type in.
The 3G service was a permanent fixture on the Party Girl graphics and would regularly broadcast compliant snippets of live feed to a small video window through the first half of the night. The show would also feature live promos on screen where the night’s featured 3G performers would appear in person on the Party Girls set to promote their shows on the service. Babestation, (the channel behind Party Girls) had it’s own 3G girls in 2008/2009. And in addition to this 3G service which often featured lesser known girls, the more popular names at the time would often perform ‘3G Specials’.
When Babestation hit Freeview in May 2009 it still had it’s own 3G girls who would promote the service on the freeview show. However within a matter of months Babestation’s ‘in house’ 3G service was shut down. The lesser known 3G girls dissappeared and were replaced by bigger name Babestation girls on a more regular rotation in addition to their appearances on the TV babe channels. In the late spring of ’09 Babestation live 3G promotion would include uninterrupted full screen footage of the Freeview babes with the live 3G promo appearing in a small video inset. Although 3G promos could also run full screen.
Following this there was a short period in which Babestation relied on an overseas facility for its 3G service, said by the Babestation girls at the time to be based in Prague. But in mid July, Babestation started streaming a TV-compatible version of Sexstation to Freeview, in a small inset box onscreen. This was a stream which had already been featured on Sexstation’s ‘home’ channel Partyland for some time.
When Babestation and Partyland fully merged at the end of Summer, the Sexstation 3G girls became closely integrated with Babestation. Indeed, quite unlike the outcome with Babestation’s previous 3G girls, the most popular Sexstation 3G models became very big Babestation names. Jada and Michelle Moist proved to be by far the greatest successes, although the likes of French Chloe, Cherry and Jess Lloyd also got varying amounts of airtime on the BS Freeview babe channels.
But Jada, Michelle, and other former Sexstation TV girls such as Karina Currie were not only major names on Babestation Freeview by early 2010 – they were also earmarked to help drive forward a new project, which would be the missing link between the underground backwater of 3G, and the high profile cash machine of Babestation 1.
ENCRYPTED TV
Making it’s debut on the night of 14th to 15th April 2010, Babestaton Xtreme was an encrypted TV channel, whose USP was exclusive content showing Babestation girls in a more explicit light. It was similar to the 3G concept in that it played on viewers’ desire for harder visuals than free-to-air television could offer, but the implementation was a lot more ambitious. For most of the encrypted channel’s tenure, the webcam services so heavily promoted in 2008 and 2009 took a back seat. In all honesty there was barely room to promote the main services during this period, let alone the peripherals, but the uptake on cam services was always going to suffer with Xtreme on offer, so there would have been little point in trying to make a big deal of them.
Promotions for Babestation Xtreme were far more regular and impactful than the old 3G promos, and they were often presented by dedicated presenters who were not themselves involved in the encrypted content. There was a much greater do or die element to Babestation Xtreme. It wasn’t something that could just sit there in the background – it cost money, and it had to pay for itself. The BSXtreme launch, introduced the concept of Babestation presenters using a TV monitor to illustrate their sales pitches. This was not a half-hearted plan.
But Babestation Xtreme was not a universally popular idea – even among fans. There was a strong opinion in some quarters of the babeshow forums that the channel would drive out Babestation’s best glamour models and establish porn stars in their place. Some of Babestation’s top glamour models did indeed depart around the time of the Xtreme launch. However, Babestation were very fortunate to have girls like Jada and her former Sexstation colleagues (all of them quality glamour girls who also did explicit work), plus Ree Petra, First Lady Dani O’Neal of course, and in particular, Camilla Jayne – the dream glamour star whose exclusive-to-Babestation journey into new, explicit territory was the real backbone of the channel through the rest of the year.
Initially, Xtreme only carried pre-recorded content, but from the night of 28th to 29th May 2010 it began to feature ‘Live Sex Shows’. Below, you can see an example of Jada and Karina Currie on their live BS Xtreme show on that first night.
From March 2011, Naked Babestation steadily began to replace the Live Sex Shows. Naked Babestation was as near as the encrypted channel got to duplicating the 3G service, bringing phone sex lines to BS Xtreme for the first time. It was basically just the straightforward Babestation sex chat service with more explicit visuals. Naked Babestation appeared to raise the babe channel’s revenue prospects, but were the phone sex calls it attracted actually new business, or just a diversion of existing business?
That question seemed to have been answered by 2012, when Babestation Xtreme looked to be struggling. In the September of that year, Xtreme was reconstituted into Babestation X – the main novelty of which appeared to be an attempt to charge viewers for the kind of broadcasts they used to get for free. That was always going to be a tough one to pull off, and in July 2013 Babestation’s encrypted channel closed down.
DEATH OF ‘XTREME’
The official explanation for the death of Babestation’s encrypted TV channel was that the authorities were getting tough, and the organisation could not screen the kind of content it wanted or needed to. I suspect, however, that the real problems were commercial, and stemmed from one huge, fundamental flaw…
Whereas pervcam or 3G services escalated viewer spend, an encrypted TV channel potentially diminished it. The encrypted channel invaded the territory of Babestation’s other core services, providing solutions, at a very low spend per head, that viewers would otherwise have had to pay much more to find. Who, for example, would spend £30+ eavesdropping on a dirty girl/girl telephone chat when they could pay a fiver and see the same girls having actual sex, with all the dirty talk thrown in? Who would spend £20 downloading photos to their phone when they could simply pay £5 and see everything they were looking for in the photos, but a lot more of it? This was the glaring problem with Babestation Xtreme. The channel migrated business from more expensive services, to a less expensive service. 3G had been doing the opposite.
Classic BS Xtreme promos
Secondary flaws included the encrypted service’s marketing, which interfered with the marketing of other key services on the free-to-air channels, and vice versa. The kind of promotion needed to really drive sales of the encrypted TV service to desired levels (taking into account the low revenue per head) could have ended up virtually obliterating Babestation 1. Meanwhile, the power-selling tactics used to promote the phone sex lines and photo downloads on BS1 (some even perhaps compensating for business lost to Xtreme) were almost certainly disengaging and losing the attention of the potential encrypted subscriber. Had Babestation’s encrypted babe channel survived, it would have been a virtual miracle. That it continued for so long was a testament to Babestation’s renowned tenacity.
Interestingly, in the latter stages of BSX (which subsequently became a Web show for a very short time), the babe channel was used as a sort of ‘landing pad’ to drive sales back towards the cam services. The wheel had come full circle.
[UPDATE – 02/11/2013: Freeview Channel 174 re-commenced transmission of Babestation X from midnight on 1st November 2013. At the time of this update the broadcasts feature pre-existing recorded matter only. There has been talk of a re-introduction of live content, but it’s difficult to see how, in the light of history, success could be expected if the channel and its marketing infrastructure follows the same path as before.]
