I believe that the two videos a day include the solo masturbation videos. If you're only counting boy/girl and girl/girl videos, then it would be 2 a week (one b/g for Twisty's Hard, one g/g for When Girls Play).
Once I actually called them, cancelling took no more than 2-3 minutes (I just gave some info, they quickly offered me a discounted rate which I turned down, and it was done), but the fact that I couldn't complete it with their web form or online chat was slightly troubling. And this wasn't just a one-time thing, either, as I tried both the form and the chat on two separate days and it didn't work either time.
Current Member for less than 1 month (at the time of review).
Pros:
Huge amount of content (over 15,000 sets and 5800 videos)
Video and picture quality is very good (pics go up to 2000x3000, video to 720p)
Active forum where staff interact and seem to listen to requests
Interactive live shows every 2-3 months free for members
Cons:
No universal search box (can only search from certain pages)
Navigation is nowhere near as intuitive as it could/should be
Small bugs pop up in various places (old videos missing thumbnails, code leaking at the bottom of some pages, things generally just not working correctly)
Had trouble cancelling (both the online form and the online chat didn't work, had to call in to cancel)
Bottom Line:
The truth of the matter is that I knew this was a site that I wasn't going to like as much as some other people here for 2 reasons. First, I prefer videos to photos, and I primarily know Twistys as a photo site. Second, I knew that their Twistys Hard section was "relatively new", so I wasn't expecting much boy/girl content. But the PU deal was too good to pass up. And while I was pleasantly surprised about both of those things when I joined, there were enough things I didn't like about the site that it left me disappointed.
For the photo section, it was about as good as I was expecting, which is to say quite excellent. The pictures are all quite large and sharp from the ones I looked at, and come in small, medium, and large sizes, with the large topping out at 2,000 by 3,000 pixels. All scenes have downloadable zip files, and most of them have zips available for multiple resolutions. You can favorite photo sets and photographers, but not individual photos, which slightly surprised me but doesn't seem like that big of a deal. The one thing I will say that disappointed me is that while many of the videos actually do have accompanying photo sets, there's no easy way to go from a photo set to it's corresponding video and vice versa. You have to go to the actresses page and find the photo set released around the same time that looks similar (because they aren't necessarily released the same day).
Now to the video. The technical aspects of the videos were about what I expect from a high-level site in this day and age. There were options for standard and high definition up to 720p. No 1080p was surprising, but not a big deal to me as I usually don't download that size anyway. There's over 5800 videos, but the vast majority of them are solo videos, with only 370 videos listed as lesbian and only 240+ in the Twistys Hard category. Which led me to a nice surprise, which is that the Twistys Hard videos weren't the only boy/girl videos they have on their site. It looks like at some point very early in their existence they purchased a bunch of late 90s/early 00s video content from somewhere and put it up, which included another 900+ boy/girl videos. While I suspect that many of these videos aren't exclusive, it was the first time I'd seen most of these movies, and since the content was so old, it included many women who I didn't have any scenes of. I was able to find videos of women who I hadn't thought about in years, and videos of women who are MILFs now from back when they were still young and fresh. The videos aren't of particularly great resolution, which is to be expected, but the fact that they were there at all was probably my favorite part of my membership.
Finding and browsing all that content, though, was easily my least favorite part of the whole thing, because they didn't make it easy at all. The basic problem, in my opinion, is that the site seems to be designed as a photo site that also has some videos. And if that weren't obvious enough from some of the little issues I ran into (for example, the male talent isn't listed on the page for the scene at all, even though they have that info stored with the scene and it can be seen when you add it to your favorites, even after you do that, there's absolutely no way to go through scenes by male talent), it became clear as day when I tried to search through the videos. Because if you do, the search box says "Photo Options" instead of "Video Options". It actually took me 2 days to realize that that was the video search box and that I wasn't being taken to the wrong page. And that is far from the only bug that I found.
Speaking of which, this is the first network I've ever joined that doesn't have a universal search box on every page. The search they do have is very good and thorough (you can search models by things like eye and hair color or country of birth, and you can search by things like wardrobe and location). But you can only do it from a couple pages (the model, photo, videos, and Twistys Hard index pages, to be specific). If you're anywhere else on the site, you have to go back to one of those 4 pages to search. Which just seems like an unnecessarily large pain. It also seems counter intuitive that while they have a space for your profile on every page, you have to actually visit your profile to find a link to see things you've favorited. They could have just added those links to the space they've reserved on every page.
One last thing that left a bad taste in my mouth is that when I tried to cancel, the website wouldn't let me. Their form wouldn't work, and when I tried to do the online chat, I never got a response. I ended up calling their customer support line and that worked fine, but it never should have gotten that far.
So, in the end, while there was a good amount of good content here, it was just so much of a hassle to go through that content that I can't see myself being a member of this site for more than a month or two at a time.
I generally research before I join a site, so I know what I'm getting into. So I knew before joining Twistys that I was going to a site that is primarily a photo and solo site with some hardcore videos thrown in as well. And for the most part that's been true. But I must admit that I was really pleasantly surprised when I started looking at their older video content and started finding hardcore videos that have to be from around the start of the last decade (technically, these scenes were probably made earlier than the earliest updates to the site). It has honestly been the best thing about my membership so far, since I'm not really much of a picture guy.
I think they debuted a "Twisty's Hard" section a while back with your basic boy/girl videos, but I can't remember how long ago this was so I don't know how many total hardcore videos they have up. Looking at their preview, it looks like they do one a week.
Was a member approx. 2 months prior to this review.
Pros:
75,000+ scenes (even including repeats and extras) with 20-30 added every day
Good streaming player
Lot's of scenes that aren't available anywhere except VOD sites
Ability to cut scenes to only watch certain portions
Cons:
Navigation is okay, but could be better
Download options (could use 1080p HD option)
Most new uploads are standard definition
Didn't max out my download speed most days
Some premium channels don't do HD uploads for recent movies
Bottom Line:
When talking about Videobox, in the end it comes down to the basic question of quality vs. quantity. Which isn't to say that there isn't good content here. There is, and in a general sense, there's a lot of it. It's just that there's so much content, that a lot of the good stuff can just get lost, so you have to go hunting for it. And if you're solely focusing on the newly uploaded movies (which is a bad idea, IMO), then the ratio of good to bad looks even worse. When you're running a site with this much content, the thing you absolutely have to focus on is search and discovery. Making it as easy as you can find to find the type of content you're looking for makes the site look a lot better, because there's probably going to be something you really like here no matter what you're tastes are. And while Videobox does look like it's trying improve there, it looks like there's still a ways to go.
As stated, the big draw of Videobox is the amount of scenes. They list over 85,000 scenes, which is more than any other company that I can think of. Even if you get rid of all the repeated uploads (of which there are a lot), you've still probably got more than 75,000 scenes. Forget about a month, that's more content than most people could hope to go through in half a year. The content goes back at least a good 20 years, and you can find scenes that are a good deal older than that. And many of these scenes/movies are from companies that not only don't produce content anymore, but closed up shop before the internet became the primary method of porn distribution. In other words, these are scenes from companies that don't have websites, so outside of VOD this is the only place you can find them. Having that many scenes allows you to have so much variety in them that there is almost literally something for everyone.
When it comes to watching those scenes, everything is pretty much standard (good streaming, good downloading), with 2 caveats. The first is that the quality maxes out at 720p. Which is disappointing, but not a deal breaker. The second is a feature they have that makes it so that you don't have to download the whole scene if you don't want to. Basically, when you go to the scene page, you can pick a start point and an end point, and then just download the video between those two points. It works really well, and I can see it being great for people who just want specific acts inside a certain scene.
And now we get to finding those scenes. They do offer the basics that most large sites have in terms of finding scenes. All scenes are tagged with female talent and tags specific to the acts in the scene, so you can look for them that way. You can also combine these tags to search for multiple things at once. There is a small issue where searching for a tag (act or actor) with the search box doesn't always show all the scenes that have that tag on them. There are also a small amount of scenes that are tagged with the male talent in them as well, which is both nice and disappointing. It's nice that they have the ability to do it, but it's disappointing that it doesn't look like they have any interest in doing it. I've always found it's one of the easiest ways to decide which scene of a particular performer I'd like to watch, and think every site that is large enough to have recognizable male talent in their scenes should say who they are in some way. You can favorite movies, scenes, and actors, but not studios or directors, as far as I can tell. And as has been mentioned by someone else recently, it would actually be a great thing if it could notify you that someone in your favorites list has a new scene uploaded. It would prevent a lot of having to dig around to find their scenes.
There were also a few smaller annoyances that I encountered in my time here. The first was that I could never get a single file to max out my download speed. I can max out at about 2.5-3MB/s on pretty much every other site I visit, but here I never got above 2, which was strange. Another thing was the lack of HD in most of the recent uploads. Generally, when they upload 5 movies per day, and only one of them is HD. This is acceptable when it's obvious that the movie was shot before the spread of HD cameras. But what I don't like is when I know that movies were shot in HD, but there is no HD version uploaded. This was especially noticeable on the Vivid premium channel, which was doubly annoying seeing as I paid extra for it. And even with that, Vivid was still worth it, since as far as I know Vivid's site doesn't allow downloads, while their Videobox channel does.
Just on the basis of the amount of content they have, I think every porn movie fan should join Videobox at least once, as there's bound to be enough content to keep you happy for at least a month. Whether you should join for longer depends on your tastes, and how much effort you're willing to put into finding content that you will like.
I think that when they decide to license, they probably don't get to choose whether or not they get HD, whomever they're licensing it from does. For example, it looks like they've just started uploading scenes from Teen Fidelity/Porn Fidelity, but all those scenes are in standard definition, even though at least some of them are available in high definition on that site.
I agree that they'd probably be better off if they focused on 1-3 movies per day and just made them of "better quality" (i.e. HD, more well known actors/studios). That would probably buy them some more time before the content dried up entirely. About the only way I can see them being able to get back ahead of the curve now is if they were to attempt to buy content from websites that have stopped updating relatively recently. It would give them a ton of (probably) lightly seen content at a cheap price.
I just don't see how they're going to fix their HD problem without raising the subscription price, to be honest. Because most of the companies that still exist and are shooting their content in HD already have their own websites and aren't going to sell/license that content to Videobox. So they're probably just going to shell out more money to different companies to get their not-new HD content. And as you noted, even the premium channels aren't doing it, since they still want to give you a reason to join their site instead of going through Videobox. This is just the danger of being a site that doesn't produce its own content. They're at the mercy of the market, and the market isn't going to be kind to them.
I just joined last week, and I'd like to say a few things. First is that I'm not finding VB3 as hard to navigate/get through as it seems that other people are, with one exception. When you do a search for a girl from the search bar at the top of the page, you get all of her scenes, including the ones that may be on the different channes (Evil Angel, Vivid, etc.). But if you go to a girl's profile page and go to her scenes from there, you only get the ones that aren't part of a channel. I can't really figure out why this happens, either. I know that this happens in VB3, but I haven't check to see if it happens in the old format as well. Second, for about a night, I just could not get the videos to play in VB3. If I went back to the old layout they'd play fine, but in the new layout they would never load. This was cleared up by the time I woke up the next morning, but it was still weird.
I'm not worried as to whether or not it'll be a positive experience since I've never been a member here before. So without a doubt, there will be enough content there to keep me entertained for at least a month, but probably 2 or 3. That, and I tend not to care as much about things like breast size (or implants), age, or the type of scene it is (anal, vaginal, DP, etc). I just want to see a woman I find attractive having orgasms, which makes me pretty easy to please. I don't even mind lower quality (640x480 or so) if it's from a scene old enough that I know that there isn't any better quality of it out there/possible. I'm much more worried about the multiple comments about crappy navigation than I am about not liking the content. Because what good is having good content if it takes me forever to find it?
Because I think this is going to be the next site I join, I've been reading the comments and reviews and seen a couple people talk about the lack of quality in some of the more recent updates. So I thought about it for a second, and I realized something. That the death of DVD porn is basically the reason for the lessening of quality of the scenes here. Basically, pretty much any studio worth its salt right now, even if they are a primarily DVD company, is setting up its own website for its own content. And because of that, those companies aren't going to sell their content to sites like Videobox because then they lose the main reason for anyone to join their individual sites. The only companies that are going to sell them newer content is companies that just don't want to have an internet presence and companies that try to be more about selling the experience of their website than selling their content (Pink Visual being an example of that). So the only thing they have left to buy is older content. And as DVDs become less and less important, they have less and less new content to buy, and have to search for older content that they haven't bought yet. So either they're going to have to get into the business of creating their own content, or they're going to be left scraping the bottom of the barrel.
If there's one thing I've learned from joining sites for the past 3 or 4 years, it's that you should probably give them more than a day to fix things, because some sites just don't work that fast.
I keep meaning to join this site, but never actually doing it, mostly because I know I'll probably be partially paralyzed by the choices and either not download anything for a few days or downloading so much that I need a brand new hard drive. But I think now is the time, especially so that I can see what the difference between the old and new versions of the site and see for myself if the new version is that bad.
Which is why I would love to find a way to access their video content without joining their site. The idea that this place might have been that, even if I had to pay an extra fee on top of the normal membership, might have been enough to get me to join.
The reason I'm asking is because I'm already a member at Videobox, and I wanted to know if VideosZ is worth a subscription in addition to/following that. I'm intrigued by the access to Hustler (which is a studio whose content I want, but whose website I do not want to join), but the idea of it being behind a three month paywall when I only wanted to join for a month is disappointing.
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