Benji Garcia says he likes nightclubs with hot music and hot women.
To help him decide which clubs offer that on any given night, he uses the website BarOptic.com.
“It helps me decide what clubs me and my boys want to go to,” said Garcia, 32, of Aurora. “The club with the most people – and the most women – is the one we go to.”
The website provides visitors access to live-streaming videos from more than a half-dozen bars and nightclubs in Denver during peak hours. Participating establishments include The Church, Vinyl and Tryst Lounge.
The service is free for users, allowing barhoppers to check out the action inside a bar or nightclub before potentially standing in line or paying a cover charge. At Vinyl, for example, cover charges can range from $10 to $20; line wait times can exceed 10 minutes.
BarOptic.com users can also access the service via certain Internet-enabled mobile phones.
BarOptic charges bars for its service: $5,500 a year for one camera. For three cameras, the price tag is $9,900 a year.
“What better way to show my clubs to the world?” said Regas Christou, whose family operates a half-dozen metro-area clubs, including The Church and the Shelter. Christou said some of his friends, including ones based in Europe, visit BarOptic.com to watch performances by big- name artists.
Live video of The Church is available Thursday through Sunday nights, from 10 p.m. through 1:40 a.m., according to BarOptic.com.
The Sutra Room, a nightclub at 1109 Lincoln St. in Denver, recently had a BarOptic camera installed.
Such webcams are not new. Clubs from Key West, Fla., to Austria have live-streaming video at their establishments, which can be viewed at websites such as beer100.com.
Impetus was empty club
For BarOptic founder Joseph Salvador, 27, it’s serious business.
“If this doesn’t work, I will definitely go bankrupt,” said Salvador, a Colorado native and a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado.
He hatched the idea two years ago after waiting in line for more than an hour to get into what he thought was the hottest nightclub in Boston.
After he paid a $20 cover charge and walked in, he saw that the place was empty.
That experience – along with about $50,000 in credit-card debt – launched AdverMotion LLC, a Denver-based company doing business as BarOptic.com.
The nine-person company also makes money through website advertising.
It plans to soon introduce commercials that will play before the live-streaming videos begin, Salvador said.
In addition to Denver, Salvador has rolled out the service in Phoenix and Boston.
He said he plans to introduce it by year’s end in at least three other major U.S. cities, such as Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago.
BarOptic averages about 120,000 page views a month, he said. The number of page views per user per day has increased by 69 percent compared with three months ago, according to Alexa.com, a website that tracks Internet traffic.
However, only some bars will be interested in the service, in part because of privacy concerns for employees and patrons, said Janelle Hempel, a manager at Govnr’s Park in Denver.
“We would never pay anyone to do that,” Hempel said. “Word of mouth is our best marketing tool.”
Hempel said the bar is considering installing a webcam that would record action at the bar. The footage would be shown through Govnr’s Park MySpace .com page, Hempel said.
Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, said there are no laws prohibiting bars or nightclubs from installing cameras to monitor workers or patrons.
Even so, Givens said bar owners should disclose to customers that cameras are rolling and designate areas where the action is not being recorded.
Staff writer Will Shanley can be reached at 303-954-1260 or wshanley@denverpost.com.
