Ratings & Reviews
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All the reviews and ratings from this user. |
| Type |
Site - Score |
Feedback / Review |
Date |
Review
1
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Naughty America
(0)
94.0
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| Status: |
Current Member for over 6 months (at the time of review).
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| Pros: |
-Over 3000 exclusive videos, with 13 added each week in multiple formats (multipe WMVs topping out at 720*480, MP4, and high definition Flash [FLV])
-7-8 live interactive solo shows every weekday with 3 different girls (with archives of some older shows available)
-Very easy to use navigation system
-Good to great customer service depending on where you go to get it
-Live non-nude (for the most part) interactive morning show that is unlike anything I've seen from any other website
-Good amount of variety in models, with various ages and body types |
| Cons: |
-Ads on their members page for other websites
-Pics aren't very high resolution (673px × 1000px portrait or 850px × 573px landscape)
-Video quality on older videos isn't good (but they are in the process of remastering)
-Not much originality in scene setups
-Bugs over the last month while they have been changing their members infrastructure
-Auto-playing video appears on some of the main pages |
| Bottom Line: |
There are many sites that compete in the category of semi-reality networks. To me, while there is definitely room for improvement, this one is the best of the bunch for a couple reasons:
First is the customer service. I said in the pros that it is good to great depending on where you go because there's more than one way to get service. I've gone through their regular customer support, and it was an altogether good experience. I got replies quickly, and the problems were usually fixed (if possible) within a day or two. But for problems that aren't specifically with your account, a better place to go is their forums/message board, which is checked by their staff. Problems are often solved within a few hours, and you can find out if the problem is just you or widespread.
Second is the live shows, which I have noticed aren't really talked about in most people's reviews or the official TBP review. Very few networks offer regular cam shows in addition to their scenes, and none offer as much live content as this. The nude cam shows give you a chance to actually talk to your favorite stars while you watch them basically perform a solo scene. But, for me, the best live show is the one that doesn't feature any sex. The morning show (Live with Lauren) is basically like a 4 hour TV morning show with porn. Which may not sound entertaining, but it is. And, this is actually the absolute best place to go for customer support if possible, as the host actually works for the company and can usually get information about a problem to the right person so it can be fixed immediately. There is also an interview portion with each of the stars doing cam shows that day, where you can ask them real questions without having to compete for their attention with 100+ people asking for sexual favors.
As far as the rest of the website is concerned, it is still great, but there is room for improvement. The search features are, in my opinion, fantastic. There's an auto-complete search box at the top of every page. You can browse though their model list by letter, with pictures of each model available. Videos are also tagged by categories, so you can find different niches easily (MILFs, natural tits, outdoors, threesomes, etc.). There is multi-tag search available, but it is very limited in usefulness.
The videos are good, but they do lack originality. Especially within sites, the videos are pretty much the same scenes with different actors. Also, the site tries to uphold a more "couples-friendly" image, so the content is pretty tame, while still being hardcore sex. The video quality is good, and they have been upgrading to shooting most scenes in high definition in the past few months. Older scenes don't look great, but remastering is happening, albeit at a slow pace. The pic resolution is still small compared to most other websites, as well.
This is a very good website for people looking for lots of good content at a good price. And a great one for people new to online porn. |
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12-06-09 02:36am
Replies (5)
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Review
2
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VideoBox
(0)
86.0
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| Status: |
Was a member approx. 2 months prior to this review.
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| 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. |
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05-20-13 06:33pm
Replies (0)
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Review
3
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Reality Kings
(0)
84.0
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| Status: |
Current Member for less than 1 month (at the time of review).
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| Pros: |
-Very good streaming media player (time-coded screen shots, jump-to links)
-Huge library of 6K+ videos
-Lots of variety in content |
| Cons: |
-Huge HD file sizes, and not enough download options (1080p mp4, SD mp4, SD wmv, mobile) for even newer videos
-Confusing site navigation
-Bad actor tagging/actor pages
-Small photo sizes (600px by 900px)
-Page and site layout seems dated |
| Bottom Line: |
The first thing that I noticed when I joined the site was the breadth of videos that they had. Not just the amount (the over 6000 basically exclusive videos is a large number and impressive in and of itself), but the variety of the selection as well. If you like European women, there's two sites dedicated to that. Black or Latina women? Each get their own site. Teens get two sites. MILFs get a couple as well. Big asses? There's a site for that. Lesbian sex? That too. Basically, as long as your taste runs somewhere along the general line that is mainstream porn, there's gonna be something here for you, and not just a small amount of it either.
Which brings me to my first negative point: Finding that content is not as easy as it should be. When I first join a site, the first thing I do is look for videos of actresses that I know I already like. When you do that here, there's no guarantee that all you'll actually find all the scenes that feature that actress. The first problem is that, for two of the sub-sites in particular, the tags are inconsistent and occasionally incomplete. One of the sites' (In the VIP) issue is that they basically tag every girl in the scene, even if they aren't the girls having intercourse in that scene. The other (Money Talks) only tags the last girl in the scene, even though there is usually more than one part of the scene that contains sex, so you have to hope that someone in the comments below the scene can identify the other girls so you can find them. Even beyond that issue, when you try going to the individual actor pages, it will only show you the most recent 9 scenes. There's a link on the bottom of the actor page if they have more than 9 scenes to help you find the rest, but my first couple times that happened I kinda glanced over that link and didn't realize it was there. It just all seemed a little confusing, and there has to be a way they can make it easier.
That confusion also extends to the general layout of the site. The whole thing looks like it was developed around 2007-2008 and hasn't been updated since, which is ages in internet time. This seems most evident on the page for each scene, which are tab based and reload each time you click on one of the tabs. This would make sense in the past, when not everyone had high-speed internet and you just wanted to get the entire page loaded as fast as possible, but nowadays everything should should all be loaded on one page, and I shouldn't, for example, have to leave the streaming video page just to go back to the preview page to look for other scenes featuring the same actress. Another small issue I have is with the way the top layout bar works. When you click the part that says home from watching a scene, it only takes you back to the home page of the sub-site that that scene is from, not back to the main homepage, which you get to by clicking the logo instead. Clicking the favorites tab works the same way. This was something else that I didn't notice at first and took me a while to figure out, when it really didn't need to.
Once you find a scene you want to watch, there are many ways to enjoy it. The best way is the site's Flash video player, which is pretty much the best I've seen on any website. At the bottom of the video is a scrolling group of thumbnails, and clicking any of these takes you to the specific point in the video that that thumbnails is from. Right above that are links that take you to specific sex acts in the scene (blowjob, cunnilingus, etc). Both of these make it incredibly easy and fast to get to exactly the part that you want to see. The download options are relatively standard, but the 1080p sizes are huge (2-4 GB per scene), and the next option down is only slightly better than SD. They would benefit greatly from having a 720p option like many other sites do, that would be a nice balance between size and video quality. There's also a picture gallery, but the pictures are pretty small (900x600), and many times the whole set seems more like screenshots than actual photographs.
Even though this was my first time joining the site, Reality Kings content is some of the earliest internet porn that I ever watched, as I first obtained a high speed connection in 2001 and proceeded to download nearly everything I could get my hands on. A lot has changed about porn and the internet and internet porn in the past decade, and a lot of companies have come and gone, but they have stuck around and blossomed. After having joined, while I think the content is still generally top class, the website itself is falling behind the times a bit, and in need of an update.
Also, while there has been talk in other reviews and comments of a download limit, I downloaded about 16GB worth of video over the course of about 2-3 hours and was never cut off from browsing or downloading. |
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04-23-12 02:06am
Replies (0)
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Review
4
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Hot Movies
(0)
84.0
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| Status: |
Current Member for over 6 months (at the time of review).
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| Pros: |
-Large, varied selection of movies
-Most content is pretty well described/tagged
-Many different player options (quality, mobile players)
-Low cost of entry and maintenance
-Customizable Home Page |
| Cons: |
-Like other pay-per-minute sites, expensive if watching lots of content
-Videos take a little bit of time to load
-Lots of premium titles (cost more than normal) |
| Bottom Line: |
The selection of movies here is very large and very varied, stretching from the classic porn of the 70s to today, and filling a whole bunch of different niches. If your tastes run anywhere near mainstream, you're likely to find something that you like. And the site does make it easy to do so. Not only do they do the customary tagging of each movie by actors and actresses so that you can find the actors that you like, in most movies each scene has its own set of tags, covering things like the location, the sex positions, and the performers appearances. You can generally get a good idea of the content of a scene just by reading the tags, which helps you to be able to find the stuff you like without having to use a few minutes on stuff that doesn't contain what you're looking for.
As far as the technical aspects of watching the video, they're good, but it could stand to be improved. They offer three choices of how to watch the videos (Flash, Silverlight, and WMP), which should cover you no matter what operating system you're using. The video quality is good, but not great, even at ultra and mega settings. When starting a video, it generally takes somewhere around 15-30 seconds between when you see the window and when the video starts playing which is longer than most any other site I've been to. They have a mobile site that supposedly works with both iOS and Android devices, but I haven't had the opportunity to check it out yet.
Navigating the site takes a little bit of getting used to, but is easy once you have, and they have a customized home page feature that can make it very easy to get to the content you're looking for. The classic homepage does a good job of showing you the newest and most popular videos, but can be a little confusing of a starting point if you're looking for something specific, especially since the search bar isn't at the top of the screen. But with the customizable home page, you can pin specific movies or actors to your home page so that you can get to them quickly, and you can rearrange the elements on the page making the site much easier to use.
And now to the cost. The actual costs to buy minutes look to be about the same as most other PPM sites. If you're only watching a few minutes a day, it's fine, but it can get expensive quickly. Like AEBN, they have premium titles that cost more than 1 minute per minute to watch (between 1.5 and 3 minutes per minute), but they seem to have more of them, and some movies are premium here that aren't premium there. They offer the option to rent and buy movies, but the prices are along the same lines of buying/renting DVDs, which isn't much better cost-effectively. But (and this is what makes this my preferred PPM site), they offer enough deals and promos for the site that it can be very cheap to be a prolonged member. They offer 10 free minutes when you sign up, and every day they have a link on the site for a free minute or two that is easy to see. They have a rewards program that gets you points when you buy minutes that can be redeemed for rentals. And last year around the holidays they gave away a ton of free minutes and rewards points and rentals, to the point where I have never paid to add minutes from my account and I went from the original 10 free minutes to having 4 lifetime rentals and 100 minutes. Just the extra free minute or more per day alone makes me prefer it to AEBN, who offer 30 initial minutes instead of 10, but with no way of earning more without paying for it.
Coming from someone who had previously only joined subscription based web sites (pay a price per month, have access to all of the sites content), pay-per-minute sites such as this one are a little different, and a little harder for me to figure out how I should use, let alone how to review them. You have access to a lot more content than nearly every subscription site (Videobox might come close), but you have to pay for it piece by piece, which way more expensive in the long run for someone who consumes anything more than a few minutes of content per day. In the end, I found that the best way for me to use them is basically as a preview site, something secondary to other sites that I am a member of. If I want to check out the content of Elegant Angel movies before joining their website, I can stream a few minutes of a few movies to see if I like it. Or I can check out that new girl I've heard about or seen in pictures but never watched a scene of. Just that option/opportunity, in addition to the benefits of being a prolonged member, make me likely to stay a member of this site for a long period of time, even if I don't use it very often. |
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04-10-12 12:38pm
Replies (3)
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Review
5
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Elegant Angel
(0)
82.0
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| Status: |
Was a member approx. 1 month prior to this review.
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| Pros: |
-Good amount of scenes (1900+)
-Multiple download resolution options (HD, SD, mobile)
-Very high quality content
-Some good scene/actress filtering options (though some don't work as well as they could) |
| Cons: |
-Small amount of picture sets (130+), resolution of pics not very high
-Can go decently long periods of time without any updates
-Some DVDs they have released are not on the site (even recent ones)
-Navigation can take getting used to |
| Bottom Line: |
The first thing I'm going to talk about is the actual content on the site. Elegant Angel has been around as a DVD company for over 20 years, and for at least the past 5-6 have been one of my favorite DVD companies in American porn. They shoot with the best girls and the best guys, and get many of those girls to do things for them that they had never done with any other company. Every year, they get 'first' scenes from some of the biggest girls in the industry. Their directors are all top notch, and none of their scenes that I've watched have felt over or under-produced. As far as just the quality of the scenes on the site, I'd honestly place them as probably my favorite website that I've ever joined. But content isn't the only thing that determines how good a site is to me.
At the moment, the site has over 1900 videos, which is a pretty nice amount. The movies seem to take about a month between when they are released on DVD and when they begin to be uploaded to the site. The movies go back to as far as the mid 2000s. This is nice, but Elegant Angel started producing movies in 1990. There's no videos from their truly early days, which is understandable, but it would be really nice if they had some of it. When you get to the middle of last decade, they have most of the scenes from their bigger series, but not all of them. For example, they don't have Lauren Phoenix's Buttwoman movie from 2004, even though they have movies from earlier than that posted. This is a little disappointing, but still understandable. What isn't understandable is that there's movies that they've released this year that aren't up on their site. They released Anal Students in January, yet it is nowhere to be found. Thankfully, there aren't very many examples of this, but the fact that there are any, especially from movies released in the past 6 months, is very disappointing. And even more disappointing than that was that the updates weren't consistent. For about 2 weeks during my time as a member, there wasn't a single solitary update that wasn't just a compilation from other scenes they'd already released on the site. I know that they don't actually release enough new DVDs to fill up a whole month of updates, but with the mention I made earlier of movies from their back catalog that they haven't uploaded yet, they could easily fill gapes like that with older scenes (which they do seem to have done in other instances, including over the past week or so).
The site can take a little time to get used to navigating, but not much. All of your typical sorting and tagging is there (by male or female talent, by sex act [anal, interracial, etc.]). There are also a few that aren't so common. You can filter the girls by their countries of origin or ethnicity (so only American girls, or only Asian girls). It's something that could has potential, but there are some glaring bugs For example, it goes by country of birth and not place of primary residence, so you'll see some girls that were raised American listed as, say, German because they were born in Germany. And there's no way to look by continent (so, say, all European or South American performers). You can also view scenes by DVD, and DVDs by series (i.e. Big Wet Asses), both of which came in handy many times for me.
When viewing the scenes, there are a couple of different options. They have your typical file formats and resolutions (1080p, 720p, standard def, and mobile device). All are mp4 downloads. They also have a feature that I didn't realize how much I liked until recently, which is a set of small thumbnails that, when clicked, take you directly to that point in the scene. The scenes have screencaps that can be downloaded as a zip file, but the resolution isn't very high (720 by 480). Other than the screencaps, there are no real picture sets for each scene. The site does have a separate area for pure picture sets, but these sets are very small (usually 5-10 pics), the resolution is good but not great (1280 by 720) and there's only about 130 sets.
Most of my issues with this site are easily fixable. They have enough content (in theory) to be able to fill the gaps in their schedule and make their updates more consistent. The navigation could be improved easily, and probably without redesigning the site that much. In the end, though I don't have that much experience with these types of sites, most of them seem to basically just be a function of this being a company who puts their DVD business first and their internet business very clearly second. If they were to focus their attention on their site, I think it could probably become a site that I stay a member of for a long time. Right now, though, it's just a site that I'll join every few months. |
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06-11-12 11:47pm
Replies (4)
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Review
6
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AEBN Video On Demand
(0)
82.0
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| Status: |
Current Member for over 1 month (at the time of review).
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| Pros: |
-Huge movie selection
-Multiple payment options (ppm, buy/rent movies, channels)
-Fewer premium titles than competitors
-Good search function |
| Cons: |
-Inconsistent scene tags (especially actors)
-No Flash Player (WMP and Silverlight only)
-Videos take longer to load
-Can be more expensive if watching lots of content (and no giveaway minutes) |
| Bottom Line: |
No site exists in a vacuum. All sites are (and should be) compared to the similar to themselves, to see what works, what doesn't, and what they could do better. While pay-per-minute sites aren't that prevalent, there are a few out there that seem to be doing well, and it's good as a consumer to compare them to each other to see which ones are more worthy of your time. This is why I started looking at AEBN after joining another PPM site, but it means that my opinions on this site are generally in comparison to another site.
The selection here is huge. Definitely bigger than any other site I've been to, and it's not even close. They have movies from every era, and from the huge feature companies all the way down to the small operations with a camera in someone's bedroom. From looking through their selection, I get the impression that if you're looking for something or someone and it was ever even mildly popular, you'll find it here. I've definitely found DVDs on this site that I haven't seen anywhere else that are made by other companies. And they even have a little of their own truly 'exclusive' content, which you won't find anywhere else (though I have found that not all the content marked as exclusive is actually exclusive). Also, from the browsing that I've done, they have less premium titles (ones that cost more than one minute per minute of viewing) than other sites, and some videos that are premium in other places aren't premium here.
Finding the specific content you want is relatively easy, but it could be easier. The search function is good, and returns not only actor and title matches, but studio matches as well. They also make it easy to browse all the movies in a series (i.e. Barely Legal), which can come in handy when you find one that you like. Tag searching works, but doesn't look very organized. My biggest gripe is that while they do a good job of listing all the actors in a movie, even though they separate the movie into different scenes, many (but not all) of the separate scenes don't have the actors tagged, so you may have watch a little of the movie to make sure that the scene you're about to watch actually features the actress you're looking for. Thankfully, they provide a short free preview for each scene so that you don't have to spend your minutes doing this, but it would be much easier if they just named the actors in each scene on the page.
The movie player works well enough, but I feel like it could definitely be improved. They offer the option of using Silverlight or Windows Media Player, and while both work well enough, I feel like it's strange that they don't have the option of using a Flash player when other sites do, and not everyone is going to have Silverlight installed. The Silverlight player works decently well enough, though it does take a while to get started, and if you pause, you have to wait for a few seconds for the video to buffer before it will start again. They have multiple bitrate choices (including the ability to watch some scenes in HD), but the highest options still don't match the quality of a high definition downloaded file.
The payment options are generally the same as the other PPM sites that I've been to, with one twist. You have the ability to pay for minutes to watch content, and you can also buy specific movies for rental or lifetime ownership. I got 30 free minutes when I signed up for the site, but so far I have found no way to add minutes without paying for them, so you'll have to start using your own money pretty quickly. They also seem to be introducing "channels", which allow you to pay a monthly fee and have unlimited access to that channel's content. Right now there are three available, two being from specific studios (Vivid and West Coast Productions), with the third being a "super pass" that, while it features a lot of movies, most of them seem to come from lower-tier DVD companies, with very little content that I had heard of before. The idea of channels does seem interesting, especially if they can get more companies signed up to offer their content through them.
I've stated before that I basically use pay-per-minute sites as something to let me preview things that I haven't seen before, to decide if I want to spend my money on them. And while AEBN does this as well as anyone else, they also cost more than anyone else to let me do so. If you're looking for/at the content here that you can't find anywhere else, it is definitely worth it, and if they can get more companies on board with having their own channels, it becomes an interesting alternative to signing up for that companies pay site (especially if the company has their own underdeveloped or difficult to use pay site instead). But, as good as it is, it still isn't my preferred pay-per-minute site. |
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04-29-12 01:03pm
Replies (3)
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Review
7
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Twistys
(0)
81.0
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| Status: |
Current Member for less than 1 month (at the time of review).
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| 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. |
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11-04-12 12:15am
Replies (5)
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Review
8
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The Art Of Blow Job
(0)
81.0
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| Status: |
Current Member for less than 1 month (at the time of review).
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| Pros: |
Well shot content, looks great
Very accessible webmaster (especially on social media)
Multiple download options (wmv, avi, mp4) for each video
4 years of updates (230+ and counting), and it consistently updates every week |
| Cons: |
Only basic search function (can only search title and description, no tags)
No cam shows/live shows (many, many single model sites now feature this, so it's a little negative to see one without any)
There are picture sets, but they're infrequent, so you never know if a video is going to have corresponding pictures or not
It's a minor thing, but I have to list the lack of variety as a con. You should expect it given the name of the site, but pretty much every video is just a blowjob. As long as you aren't expecting anything else, it's not really a big deal |
| Bottom Line: |
The site's layout is pretty basic, with updates presented in a blog-style layout ordered by date. The site has been around for a few years now, so there's a good amount on content here (about 140 videos and 90 photo sets). There are separate headers for if you want to view only photo sets or only video shoots. The video shoots are basically once a week, and have been for at least the past couple years. The photo sets seem to come about one every couple months on average, but there doesn't seem to be any pattern as to when they'll come out. For example, in the last 10 picture sets, there's one from last week, 2 from July, 1 from April, 2 from March, 1 from last November, and 3 from last October. And, generally speaking, they're pictures from a video shoot that was released around the same time. Videos are in three different formats (wmv, avi, mp4), and newest videos are in 720p HD. Pictures are decently sized, but not big enough to be blown up or anything like that, and can be downloaded in a zip file or individually. The search functionality is a little bit lacking, IMO. There's a basic search box that lets you search scene titles and descriptions, but it can sometimes be hard to find something specific because you don't know how to search for it (for example, to find the videos with masturbation, I had to search the word "touch"). A tagging system for the scenes would help a lot with this.
As far as the actual content of the videos, if you like watching blowjobs, then it's really good. But you have to like just watching blowjobs (and various other jobs), because that's all the vast majority of the scenes are. There's a few videos where she masturbates a little, and 2 recent updates that contain a little bit of full-on intercourse, but everything else is pretty much just mouth and member. All of the scenes I've watched were very well shot, with good lighting and camera positioning so that you can see everything clearly. Most of the videos have some music playing in/over them, but not to the point where you can't hear the action going on in the scene. The HD videos look like you would expect HD videos to, and the older ones are definitely still watchable. The best way I could probably describe the scenes is that they have an X-Art kind of feel to them, which is a very good thing.
On the right hand part of the site, Camille has links to her accounts on many different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr), as well as a link to her own blog. All of them are pretty active, and do a good job of giving you a sense of the person behind the site. Which is why I'm a little (but not totally) suprised at the lack of any type of live-streaming/cam shows. I do understand that it doesn't really fit well with the theme of the site (since the site is really about the act more than the girl giving it), I think it'd be nice if she did something even as simple as a weekly chat with members, possibly capped off with a b/j that would become come out at some point in the future as a video scene.
In the end, I would say that if you're someone that enjoys watching blowjobs specifically, this site should be a must-join for you at some point in time. But even if you're not, it's still a very good site that's worthy of at least a look. |
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11-21-11 10:44pm
Replies (8)
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Review
9
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Brazzers
(0)
79.0
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| Status: |
Was a member approx. 1 month prior to this review.
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| Pros: |
Over 2800 exclusive scenes downloadable in multiple formats (up to 720p wmv files for new members)
Decent/occasionally good customer service |
| Cons: |
Keep 1080p only for "elite" members (or those who are willing to pay on a per-scene basis) and don't make note of that anywhere before you join.
For such a large network, the content is very repetitive (easily the most repetitive out of all the large networks I've been to).
Pre-checked cross-sell on signup.
Site navagation could be much better.
Pics are not very large (533x800px if I remember correctly, but definitely not much larger than that).
They seem to have more billing issues than most major (and trusted) websites
Some older scenes with pages up, but no videos there (so no way to view videos) |
| Bottom Line: |
The dilemma I face with grading Brazzers is something I think is a little interesting. The basic question is: How do you grade a company that puts out good content regularly but engages in business practices that are at best greedy and at worst intentionally deceptive? To me, the answer is that you talk about them both, and let the person reading it make up their own minds about it.
As far as their content goes, it is among the upper echelon of network sites. They put out about 15-17 updates a week, in multiple formats all the way up to 1080p. They very recently allowed access to the 720p files for all members, but 1080p still requires you to either pay extra or be a member for an extended period of time. I can't judge how well it looks, because I don't have a computer beefy enough to run it, but I have heard good things. As far as the actual content inside the scenes, it's about what you would expect from mainstream porn. There's a thread on this site about the roughness that is becoming prevalent in porn, and that can definitely be seen creeping into the scenes on this site. In fact, they just debuted a site that is specifically dedicated to rough sex in "Pornstar Punishment". The content also suffers from another problem that many online networks face, which is that the content isn't very original, so after you've seen a few scenes from each "site", it seems like you've seen them all. The pictures are there, and there are a bunch of them, but they aren't very high-res (533x800), and to be honest, there are large groups of pictures that show basically the same thing, like no one took the time to prune though the set at all. Some people may like this, I find it a little annoying.
The website navagation is okay, but it leaves something to be desired. There are tags, but there aren't as extensive as they could be. There is a model list, but it isn't very easy or welcoming for just browsing through all the models. I might argue that navigating through models is easier on the tour page than it is on the member page, which should never be the case. The search bar works, but only for girls and scene names. The scene pages look a little cluttered, with a little too much content/information filling up the bottom of the page. And while it's easy to find out who the female talent is from the scene page, figuring out the male talent is a good deal harder, especially if you don't know them by look.
Now, as far as their business practices. The first thing, and I think it's the easiest and biggest one to harp on, is the HD content. It doesn't say anywhere that it doesn't come with the regular membership until you actually become a member. They've slightly remedied this by allowing access to the 720p content, but they still advertise the 1080p, which you can't get without the strings attached. There's also a pre-checked cross sell, which basically automatically reduces 5 points from the score of any site that has it. (continued in replies) |
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02-07-10 01:55am
Replies (1)
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Rating
10
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Desperate Amateurs
(0)
77.0
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No Review.
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09-07-10 07:01pm
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