Victoria's Secret Won't Be Safe After Webcast

Is it soft porn or hard-core marketing? Decide for yourself at 7 p.m. EST today when Victoria’s Secret offers up a live Internet video broadcast of a lingerie show to promote Valentine’s Day spending.

The show will feature top models showing off bras, panties and other silky items. A sneak preview was offered in a Super Bowl ad on TV, a 30-second commercial that cost parent company Intimate Brands Inc. $1.6 million.

“It’s the best money we ever spent,” Ed Razek, president of Brand and Creative Services for Intimate Brands, told Reuters.

The company Web site saw over one million hits within an hour of the ad, he said.

Razek estimated one billion people might be seeing today’s show directly or through TV and newspapers.

“There’s five billion people in the world and I think we can get one-in-five, who will see it one way or another,” he said.

He told Reuters he hoped that after watching the show, surfers would stay logged-on to make an order.

The show will be rerun repeatedly at the site. Broadcast.com, which will deliver live video coverage from the runway, is using high-speed multicast feeds ranging from 28 kilobits per second to 300 kbps to ensure high quality video.

Victoria’s Secret launched its online store in December. No sales results for the site have been released, though the company has said millions of visitors have logged on and the site been profitable from the start.