| Review of The Entertainment Network:
Intro:
If first impressions are anything to go on, this site's a keeper. Extensive graphic frames, search menus, video loops and an audio track greet the first time viewer, giving an immediate indication of the budget behind this major contender in porn megasites. Really, I've never seen a site so well branded and marketed. As I sit back and gawk for a moment, Monique Alexander pops up in a cute little video spot offering to help "revive my freak." Various ten.com logos flash, spin, and fade into the ever changing background. The longer I watch the more I pity the hapless dialup surfers that must wash up here. Even the commericals are fun. . .
Navigating:
Cruise around for a minute and it's clear that this site's about as big as you might expect it to be given the elaborate site design. I generally try to offer some rough estimate of the number of photo galleries and video clips available, so I was relieved to find that the pics are all neatly arranged and numbered--303 galleries (50 pics per) make up the full stash as of
February 22. Choose a group of twenty-five and you'll find a grid of thumbnails as well as a high-res preview window, allowing you to get a better idea of what's in store before you load entire galleries. Jump into any one gallery and you'll find the whole thing neatly thumbnailed. From there, enlarge any one photo and you'll find a handy slide-show feature as well as "previous" and "next pic" preview windows.
The images themselves aren't huge at about 400X600 pixels per, but given the professionalism of the shoots, the smooth interface, and the possibility of searching the galleries by model, I don't really consider this much of a complaint. Videos aren't numbered, and I quickly gave up any attempt to count the clips as a fool's errand. More advanced than the photo section, the flic database is cross-referenced by title, star, sexual position, setting, clothing and even studio. Want masturbation movies, for example? Drop down the "sexual" topic heading and peruse the 20 or so subdivions of the category, organized by gender, toys employed, lubricant, orifice, and so on. Further, flick some switches in the search engine's "filter settings" and weed out anything that isn't XXX or doesn't offer a high-res, 500kb/s stream.
In case it's not clear from the intro, ten.com is a streaming video smorgasbord above all else. No downloads, just wall to wall streams of Real and Windows media. Certainly no scenario, setting, or famous star is truly ignored here, though after hours of messing around I'm pretty confident in generalizing a bit: most of the content is middle-of-the-road mainstream Hollywood XXX. If I had to bitch, I might suggest that ten.com covers all the bases but often not with any particular depth or authority. Take a more "alternative" topic area like female over male domination and you'll see what I mean. Sure, there's some latex invovled in some of the clips, but it's a bit hard to fathom how d.p. or all girl scenes fit the category. Luckily, when you find something that you like, you can add it to a list of favorites, allowing you to turn back to a library of personal gems when you're tired of playing with the very cool but occasionally imprecise search engine.
I'm not usually one to make much of bonus features, and after finding some dead links in the live chat rooms and the tentv area--what did ever happen to Betty Love?--I decided to give up on the extras and get back to the meat and potatoes. To be fair, though, there were a couple of interesting interviews in the ten.tv room and some lavishly designed star profiles, but since the whole site has a kind of all-porn satellite television feel to it, I guess I kind of found the tv area a bit redundant. The forums look nicely implemented and seem to employ the phpBB interface that's becoming the standard for bulletin boards. There's not much happening there at the moment, but give it time. Better is the Q&A column with ten.com's "resident Sex-pert," Tina. Good level headed advice from a pro all for the asking. . .
Boiling it down:
Alright, if your wallet, your modem and your work schedule can handle it, this one's a top flight adult entertainment package. The site seems to be growing at an impressive rate and clearly has an ace production team behind it. As it really is an unparalleled showcase for streaming video, it doesn't really try to compete with some of the bigger full-feature, (supposed) "dvd quality" download sites, but why should it, I suppose. Ten.com and all its flashy little original trailers is the closest thing to channel surfing paradise for pornhounds. If you've got the bandwidth and ten.com's instant gratification, vids-on-demand formula sounds right for you, rest assured that you've got a serious amount of smut to play with here and a truly wicked interface with which to navigate it. And where else do you get catchy slogans like, "Sex happens" and "Turn on, get off?" Sure it's slick and commercial, but no one said anything about "amateur" here, did they?
2004-02-27
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