In what can be seen as yet another deadly Internet undertow, ProBilling, third-party billing company 2much.net has dealt with since last summer, announced it would cease all credit card billing services, with only e-checking remaining.

Citing “challenging times for all online credit card processing companies” in their January 16 bombshell communiqué, Probilling claimed “due to increased scrutiny by credit card associations we feel that we can no longer offer reliable credit card processing”. Calling credit giants “high risk processing” Pro Billing cancelled these services with only a four-day warning on Visa and none for MasterCard.

2Much Internet services, which powers a few dozen chat websites and requires a reliable third-party billing processor to enable customer purchases, was obliged to put normal operations on hold and hunt market to seal a deal before January 20th deadline.

2Much President and CEO Mark Prince and his programming team immediately began approaching companies, dealing for compatibility to 2Much system. Each billing company is unique and shares no standards when communicating sensitive customer data between transaction points. “We have had to write new software,” said Ye Zhang, head programmer at 2Much.net, “for each of billing companies we have tested.”

Much of www.2much.net’s 2003 success is due to second quarter release of LiveCamNetwork 1.9, company’s own software, which inadvertently created what 2Much President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Prince has come to call LiveCamNetwork, or LCN.

“We build web-sites that feature best live video and audio streaming on market. But many sites out there do badly despite high quality, due to a lack of experience with e-marketing and a lack of content,” says Prince. The result was an upgrade featuring a real-time, interactive billing solution, and a performer database.

“What we do can be compared to iFriends, or rather opposite of iFriends,” Prince explained. “A chat studio owner has performers he plugs into iFriends, and they make money chatting with consenting public. But because big systems like that incorporate tens of thousands of models, this owner will set his performer in front of five or six cameras with five or six different identities, to increase chances of being selected. It’s expensive and complicated.”

With LiveCamNetwork, performers keep to one identity, their own, and can be enabled on 16, 36 and more websites at same time. Rather than farming out multiple streams, clients are drawn, via 2Much.net’s many sites, to performer. “It’s easier,” states Prince, “more efficient and makes much more money.”

Prince has dubbed LiveCamNetwork 1.9’s interactive webcaster-database and real-time billing program MBase. “It’s a catch-all word, covering performer grid and accounting program. It means Model Base – instead of database – but I abbreviated it so it would be more mainstream and encompassing.”

Each website created by 2Much.net had their stable of performers, as well as their own traffic, independent of other sites powered by 2Much. “We put performers from every site onto a common grid for every webmaster to pick and choose from. In doing this, we also combined traffic from each site. We have hundreds of performers, now, and more are signing up as we speak.”

The result is new webmasters and investors are assured of instant content and immediate traffic when they buy LiveCamNetwork 1.9 package. “The site (www.2much.net) explains it all, but has to be updated to include this information – about performer database and traffic that comes with LiveCamNetwork. The traffic, obviously, is indirect – but it’s a stepping stone a couple weeks before native traffic is built up.”

Of LiveCamNetwork, Prince said, “I was thinking from inside out, at first. I was thinking of a shared database, so that even small, beginning operators would have a chance.” Prince remembered early days, when 2much struggled against rip-tides of Internet. “I saw this as an opportunity that I wished I had back then. Joining a team that helps you stand on your own two feet. These shared performers aren’t just in a pool we’re dipping into. They’re foundation of a new network, a niche network, which includes bulletin boards, webmaster and performer forums, and as many features as we’ll be able to cram without raising our fees.”