| Review:
One thing you have to say about Ten.com (that's T.E.N, as in "The
Erotic Network") is that it's certainly no cheap rip-off
hole-in-the-wall. This site must have cost a fortune to build.
And it's probably costing another fortune to maintain. It's that big and
fancy.
It's not too hard to review this site since you can basically browse
the whole thing for free and see what's on offer. Great! What we
thought we'd do is throw out some thoughts.
(1) The site features all streaming video. You can't download any of
the movies. Is this important to you? It is to us. We much prefer
having movies that we can download. And we think the main reasons are
obvious: You can watch your favourite clips again and again whenever you
want, and playback is smoother for all but those of you on the very
fastest connections. Ten.com is designed to look and act like an adult
television network, and it succeeds at that. But it's an adult channel
that doesn't let you tape your favourite shows.
(2) Apparently when the site first launched the video was all in
RealPlayer. Most of it still is, but they're also adding clips in
Windows wmv now (and they were adding four clips a day when we
visited--it's quite a going
concern). Clips average 10 minutes in length. You get a choice of three different playback levels: lo, med
and high-res. The high-res is 500 kb/s. Modem users don't kid
yourself: even watching the lo-res stream (and why the hell would
you want to do that?) you just aren't going to
be able to use this site. You are going to need a very fast connection.
The faster the better.
(3) Ten.com doesn't produce its own porn. The material is all
licensed. It's an impressive collection of mainstream hardcore stuff,
but we urge you to look around a bit first. Do they have what you're
looking for? For example, we did a search for a few veteran mainstream
stars: Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick, and Stacy
Valentine. The results weren't good. There were no clips of Jenna or
Stacy and only seven of Tera. A few big name porn studios didn't seem to
be involved. European studios weren't well
represented. Heavy fetish? Not really. Yes, there is a lot here,
just not everything. So check it out.
(4) The clips have apparently been clipped (that is edited), so that you get
"all killer no filler". We didn't really approve of this.
Who's to decide what's filler and what's killer? One man's crap is
another man's treasure. And we definitely
didn't think the Ten.com animations that play before each clip were
nearly as cute as other people have found them. It's a little thing, but
indicative of what we felt was the site's over-design. Less
filler?
(5) The search function for the videos really is impressive. You can
filter by star, type of action, type of
clothing, studio, etc. You can also filter by playback stream and
the level of hardcore. (But what, exactly, is the distinction between XX
and XXX? We should know this.) All of these filters are very
nice--and essential for a site with this much video to choose from. The
actual search window is maybe a bit overdone, with switches and buttons
and other fancy stuff we could have done without, but it works. Also
overdone, and unintentionally hilarious, were the number of different
categories. For example, under "Masturbation - Solo - Male"
you can choose between "lubricated", "own hand",
"partners hand (sic)", and "whipped cream".
How can solo masturbation involve a partner's hand? We were curious, but
not enough to want to find out. Under "Clothing", along with
such familiar stand-bys as maid uniforms and cheerleader outfits we
found the following: 80s, Business Attire, Call Girl, Mafia, Rich Girl,
and Stripper. Needless to say, in practice it's kind of hard to keep
these straight. Don't most pornstars look like call girls? And what's a
call girl dress like anyway? And what does "80s" include?
Legwarmers? We couldn't figure it out.
(6) Extras? Yeah, well, you do get a lot of picture galleries (over
300 galleries of 50 pics per gallery when we visited), but we didn't think these were
anything exceptional or new. You get some live chats. There's
also a pretty lively "community" with a resident
"Sex-pert" and picks from the Ten.com staff. In other words,
this is a big-budget archive
site, but not without some personality.
(7) Why are there so many ads on this site?
This is a great streaming video site. In fact, it's probably the best
adult streaming video site on the Internet. But streaming is not our
preference (see above). The mega-movie sites that allow downloads, like Deluxe
Pass, VideoBox
and Videosz, are worthy alternatives.
The production has spared no expense, and it shows. As with any
streaming video site, you have to set some time aside to watch the
movies while they stream, and you will want a very fast connection to do
so.
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