| Review:
JULY
2005
RE-VISIT Time
for
a
re-visit
because
they've
changed
things
a
bit--what
the
management
calls
a
"major
redesign".
What's
changed?
Basically
they've
made
it a
lot
easier
to
browse.
You
do
everything
through
a
central
hub
with
links
that
let
you
"jump
to"
the
different
member
sites
or
individual
movies.
This
is
really
streamlined
and
you
move
around
the
network
very
quickly.
No
question
it's
a
big
improvement. But
holy
fuck
does
the
search
function
suck.
In
fact,
it's
probably
the
worst
we've
ever
seen.
It's
almost
like
not
having
any
search
function
at
all
would
be
better.
How
bad
is
it?
Well,
we
tried
searching
by
"pornstar"
and
did
a
search
for
Jenna
Jameson.
We
got
one
clip
of
two
black
people
fucking.
Tera
Patrick?
One
clip
of a
blonde
girl
fucking.
Belladonna?
Five
clips,
none
of
which
seemed
to
have
Bella
in
them.
The
advanced
search
(you
can
only
get
to
it
by
going
through
the
Search
For
Movie
function)
didn't
help
much
either.
The
keyword
searches
found
us a
whole
lot
of
stuff
that
wasn't
what
we
were
looking
for.
Seriously,
this
whole
part
of
the
site
needs
to
be
redone. Otherwise
we
still
really
like
this
site
and
think
it
holds
its
own
against
the
other
big
boys
in
the
video
network
market.
They
say
they're
adding
new
stuff
daily,
which
is
probably
true
(we
did
our
original
review
less
than
a
year
ago
and
they've
added
700
movies
since
then).
Navigation
is
better
than
you
get
in
most
AVS-style
networks,
though
the
shitty
search
capabilities
suck
it
down
a
bit.
Video
downloads
are
great.
You
still
have
the
two
choices:
low
res
250
kb/s,
high
res
1100
kb/s.
Each
scene
is
well
thumbnailed.
Kind
of
sucks
that
you
can't
download
anything
shorter
than
a
full
scene,
but
if
you
have
a
fast
enough
connection
you
won't
mind.
No
DRM
bullshit
and
they
let
you
use
download
managers. Nice
to
see
that
there's
some
different
stuff
on
the
menu.
More
vintage
and
older
movies,
as
well
as a
lot
of
European
titles.
Not
as
many
mainstream
pornstar
movies
(and
what
pornstars
you
will
find
are
names
like
Christi
Lake,
Anna
Malle
and
Asia
Carrera).
Because
it's
a
network
there's
a
lot
of
duplication
(a
number
of
the
sites
are
virtual
clones).
This
didn't
bug
us
too
much
though.
Just
don't
pay
any
attention
to
the
bit
about
having
600
sites,
or
adding
sites
daily.
The
only
thing
that
matters
is
the
number
of
DVDs
they're
adding.
And
as
we
noted
they're
doing
a
good
job
with
this. It's
a
close
call
but
we'll
take
this
one
up
to a
"9"
because
it's
a
solid
network
that's
doing
a
good
job
delivering
just
what
it
promises.
It's
not
quite
as
slick
an
effort
as
some
of
the
other
players,
but
if
you're
thinking
of
joining
a
video
network
we
suggest
you
check
it
out
and
see
what
they
have
on
tap.
There
are
other
sites
out
there
that
are
burning
video
series
that
you'll
find
equally
well
represented
here
(like
Dirty
Babysitter).
NOVEMBER
2004
REVIEWS
It might be worthwhile to start this review by talking a bit about the history,
thus far, of the movie network pass (meaning a pass to a network of different sites featuring burned DVDs for download).
In the beginning there were the passes like Adult Check and Adult
Bouncer. These were huge, sometimes giving you thousands of sites,
and cheap (usually a low annual fee), but also chaotic and often very poorly run. The people who
did Adult Bouncer tried to clean things up a bit when they came out with
Deluxe Pass. This took the idea of a general pass and
added better organization and more quality control. The next step up in terms of central planning
(not necessarily overall value) are sites like Videosz
and VideoBox, where the whole idea of a network of semi-independent sites is scrapped and what you get is a single huge video archive.
Porn Access is like Deluxe Pass: it presents itself as a network of individual sites, but the download interface and quality control is consistent across the network (all the sites are run off the
Porn Access servers).
Of course it's huge. If you want to be a player in the movie network market today you
have to be huge. Numbers when we visited were: 429 sites, 3879 movies, 11,000 gigs
of content.
It's not the largest network out there, but claims to be the fastest growing. We
had our doubts about this (Videosz adds two full DVDs a day), but given the problem of definitions, who's going to call them on it? We aren't going to split hairs. Sites seem to be getting added weekly, but it's almost impossible to tell how much
the actual content is growing. We'll just say it's a big network and leave it at that.
What kind of stuff? All kinds of stuff! Go ahead and check for yourself.
Like most networks, the members index is totally transparent. You can
browse all the content. There are no surprises. Our impression was that
the big tit and mature niches are well served. We also noticed a lot of
older movies (there were even a couple of vintage porn sites in the mix)
and some European fetish stuff we hadn't seen before.
For what it's worth, and in our opinion that's not much, here are the main
categories and the number of sites for each (at the time of our visit): amateur 26, anal
27, asian 15,
black
19, blowjobs 23, bonus
(whatever that means) 7, big tits 22, vintage/classic 6, fetish 49, gay 19, hardcore 98,
lesbian
12,
mature
22, pictures 7,
pornstars
15, teens 51, trannies 14.
The links (reproduced below) take you to random video previews from
related sites in the network.
Given the general transparency here we'll limit ourselves here to two general comments, one positive and one negative.
We'll start with the negative: In any network the browse and search functionality is very important. Even in a month it's hard to go through everything. And browsing this network is almost impossible. The search function is next to useless. From the main site you can search by keyword, category, actor and studio. This doesn't really work. The keyword function
wasn't happening at all. At first we thought this was because some (OK, a lot) of the keywords are
mis-spelled (like "breast
peircing"). And some of the keywords (like "breast
peircing", or "cum cocktail") didn't make
much sense. When we typed these into the keyword box, we got 0 results, despite the fact that we were copying them from the keyword descriptions given for specific movies. Then we noticed that these keyword descriptions were
hotlinked, so we just started clicking on them. And still got 0 results! How is that possible?
You can browse by category, but as noted already these are only a very general guide. The categories are not very descriptive and they involve quite a bit of overlap. You can find the same movies in busty, black, fetish, hardcore, and pornstars.
Some "pornstar" sites didn't seem to have any talent we
recognized. And the site descriptions are no help either. Things like "the biggest motherfucking categorized porncollection
(sic) on the planet!" are typical (the individual scene descriptions are even worse, being blurbs that seem to have been taken from the video box). A much better idea would be to just list the titles of the
movie series that are available on each site. As it is you have to actually go through each of the sites to find out that "Malibu Beach Sluts" is the
Babewatch series, and "MatureTaboo" is the Older Women, Younger Girls series, etc.
Then we tried searching by actor. We decided to look for Stacy Valentine. No problem finding her name, but the results only gave us a bunch of the big tit sites, not individual movies. This was a problem, since few of the sites even bother naming the performers.
Sure Stacy was there, but you had to look for her. Then we also discovered that not all actors who are in the network are to be found in the index.
This is a long way of saying that this is a tough network to browse, and the infrastructure doesn't make it any easier.
Other negatives, noted in brief, are the typical network complaints about how sites overlap content (we saw the same Britney Skye clip from the
Blow Me series at least three times), and the impression we had that a lot of these clips are quite old by porn industry standards (and not just the stuff in the Vintage/Classics sites either). But since this is a content issue, and you can browse all the content yourself anyway, we'll let you decide.
On to the big positive: The video here really kicks ass. You can download in two formats, high and low bandwidth wmv files. The low is a small picture and plays back around 250 kb/s. But the high is great,
looking beautiful when you watch it full screen and playing back at over 1000 kb/s. And that's for
all the video. Our only complaint with this was that the scenes don't come split into separate clips, so if you want to grab the high res scenes you are going to have to download files of 100-200+ megs every time.
Other positives include the ease of navigation among the different sites (you don't have to keep entering your password), and the thumbnail pages for the video clips.
Bottom line is the same as for most of the large movie networks. You do get a lot of stuff to download, and the tour doesn't try to hide anything. What you get is what you see. Expect the usual content overlap. The search function here is inadequate. But the video is very well reproduced and the quality is maintained at the same high standard across the entire network. Because it does have some more esoteric titles and vintage stuff mixed in you should check it out to see if they have something specific you want first. |
