In the old days, pornography was delivered as printed matter wrapped up in plain brown paper. Now it can come to you over the internet, via a set-top box with an innocuous-looking generic black chassis.
Amid the silicone and cellulite of the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, held in parallel with the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, I found FyreTV, which is like an ethernet-connected cable box... for porn.
I was skeptical. Why would anyone pay ten bucks a month and use dedicated hardware for something that's available for free over the internet? FyreTV made a good case for their product though, and it goes something like this.
The device is an innocuous looking little black box (it ships without the sticker visible in the picture).
"The only way someone would know what this is if they owned one themselves," said FyreTV founder and CEO Estefano Isaias.
The box sits near your television, where it must be connected with wired ethernet, and costs nothing. $10 per month gets you access to the full FyreTV catalog, currently comprised of about 20,000 titles from Wicked Pictures and other studios.
There's no hard drive on the device; titles stream at 1.5 MB/sec
(full DVD quality), 1.1 MB/sec, or 700 Kbps, depending on how fast your connection is. You can choose between aspect ratios of
4:3 or 16:9, and outputs include HDMI, S-Video, component, and composite.
Actress Abby Rode fondles a couple of FyreTV boxes. Photo: Courtesy of FyreTV.
You can search titles using all manner of racy keywords, and then apply filters to the search results. In the demonstration, a FyreTV
spokesperson found 922 results for "blonde," so he filtered by buxomness.
But the most compelling aspect of the service is the way FyreTV
staff have tagged every scene from every movie in their catalog with keywords. After searching or browsing your way to a scene that looks interesting, you can add it to a playlist with one click of the included remote to create a customized mix. If one of the scenes really does it for you, you can jump from there to the entire movie. And despite the streaming nature of this beast, FyreTV lets you fast forward and rewind at speeds of up to 24x.
Unlike its competition (which FyreTV says codes clunky interfaces using HTML), the company built its super slick interface from scratch using a Linux base. Ironically, the Adult Entertainment Expo doesn't allow vendors to show sex scenes, but the company's PG-13 demo video achieved DVD video quality on a 1080p display.
FyreTV has five thousand beta testers, and plans to send out another five thousand of the boxes in advance of the late January/early February launch date.
