‘TiVo for porn’ a hit at Vegas adult expo

By Joe Brown

Friday, Jan. 9, 2009 | 2:49 p.m.

Internet porn-delivery startup FyreTV just finished its beta testing program, and being geeks who make their living by dreaming up a new way of delivering porn, of course they get big yucks out of calling it the "master beta."

The brainchild of clean-cut 31-year-old Estafano Isaias, the Miami-based startup was the hottest thing at last year's AVN Adult Expo, taking video on demand to a new level by inventing what is basically TiVo for porn. Today FyreTV announced the first wireless IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) set-top box that delivers searchable adult content. The tiny black box delivers more than 20,000 near-CD quality video titles from more than 40 studios, including industry leaders Vivid Entertainment, Wicked Pictures, TeraVision, Elegant Angel and Evil Angel.

When FyreTV made its debut at the Expo last year, it signed up about 7,000 volunteers to test its Ethernet-based set-top boxes at home.

"What we found out is that most people have Ethernet coming into their living rooms," says FyreTV spokesman David Jones, upstairs at the company's two-floor 50-by-50 firehouse-themed showroom booth. "But where they would want to use the box is in their bedroom. We had a lot of people saying, 'Well my cable isn't long enough,' or 'What's the point of having a small, concealable box with a PIN-number security when there's a 50-foot cable running down the hallway from my living room to my bedroom?' So from that response, we've come out with the first wireless IPTV setup box that delivers searchable adult content."

"Searchable" is putting it mildly. The FyreTV box allows porn consumers to zero in on their desire of the moment with an almost insane degree of specificity.

Along with letting pornophiles skip the potential embarrassment of checking out flicks at the neighborhood video store, the wait for pricey videos in the mail, or the downloading of low-quality movies from the Internet, this new method of porn delivery neatly negates many of the worries about online delivery of adult video. It's high quality. There's no worry about catching viruses (the computer kind) or about the Russian mafia phishing for your credit card numbers. FyreTV requires a six-digit PIN to access the box to avoid anyone seeing anything they shouldn't see.

The porn studios love FyreTV, Jones says. "Here's the difference between the adult entertainment industry and the regular movie industry. The adult industry loves to find new ways, new distribution channels to get their product out there. There are so many restrictions and obstacles, that if you find a new way to get it out there, they're thrilled. The movie industry, on the other hand, traditionally says, 'Oh my God, let's get some content police to lock everything down.' They're starting to figure it out with things like Hulu, but they're way behind. Those are models that you could have gotten from the porn industry years ago," he says, laughing.

There are two industries that have pushed U.S. technological innovation in the last 50 years, Jones says in closing.

"One was the space race: make it lighter, cheaper, whatever it takes to get it out there into space. The other is porn. So when we had VHS vs. Beta, Beta was clearly a superior product from a quality standpoint, but VHS was open to porn. What else, you get into the Internet. Last month was the first time since the Internet was open to the public that social network usage -- in this case, Facebook -- was bigger than porn. In other words, it's the first time that anything superceded porn on the Internet."

About 25,000 people are in Las Vegas through Sunday for the Adult Entertainment Expo at the Sands Expo Center.