Black As My Soul: The "Glory Box"

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April 14, 2008

The "Glory Box"

A review of the beta FyreTV unit I received last week.

I heard about FyreTV about the time of the Adult Entertainment Expo. I believe I saw it first on Gizmodo, which mentioned the service was now in beta and accepting testers. What was I to do but to sign up? I figured, worst case, I would have to wait until it was a commercial product.

Two weeks ago I received an email asking me to confirm some personal information on the FyreTV web site. Once that was done, more communications confirmed my "Master-Beta" beta tester status. Another email announced a tracking number. Yay!

Last Monday I received the unit but it wasn't until Wednesday night that I had the time to devote to the installation.

Geek/Tech Part:

The box is quite small and light. Other than the labeling on the back for the various jacks it is all black. I would say it's roughly a third as wide as a traditional stereo or video component, and about half as tall. All that is visible on the smooth front is a red power light and an activity light. No logos. No names.

Set up was no more or less difficult than installing a DVD player, if your DVD player required an Ethernet connection. So, in my case, that necessitated some quick drilling to run some an extra network cable. My TV had available inputs so it was then only a matter of finding cables, of which I also fortunately had spares. There were some cables in the package for HDMI and left and right audio, but my TV was built before HDMI so I had to go with component video.The FyreTV unit also supports DVI output, but my one DVI input was already taken by my cable box. Definitely very nice to have options. S-video is the fourth alternative.

Also nice is that FyreTV supports wide screens. My TV has a 16:9 aspect ratio screen and I was able to select that on setup. This can be changed on-the-fly.

The one set-up "gotcha" for me was that the PIN number for the beta is not the PIN number for your personal account. I did not notice mention of that in any email communication or while I was creating my account at the FyreTV web site, but did I find the solution in their support forums.

Using the FyreTV:

It's in beta (as I may have mentioned) and even in the few days I have operated the device there has already been an update to the system. Everything is still subject to change.

As of this writing, there are about 175 movies on tap. During the beta period viewing those movies is effectively free and unlimited. They have promised a significant number of movies by launch, so I anticipate this should change dramatically.

You can search by title, studio, genre, actor/actress, and probably other ways I'm not remembering. The search is designed such that you can search across all titles, or you can add criteria to keep narrowing the focus. With 175 titles from 4 studios, today, this might not be as big of an issue. But if, as they promise, they increase selection to 20,000 titles, this will be paramount.

You can also browse through the covers of the videos as though they were DVDs. That interface is reminiscent of cover-flow on the Mac or in iTunes, but it's not as fluid. While there aren't detailed descriptions of each title, I think the cover art and title tell you as much as you really need to know. Once a title has been selected, you can choose to play from the beginning or you can select chapters from a thumbnail view.

I can tell you that we-who-are-kinky have not been ignored. While their breadth of title selection is not there yet, the categories already in place show there will be content that covers my various interests and pushes my hot buttons.

Also? This is not Cinemax. This is not R-Rated, NC-17, or unrated. It's explicit porn. Streamed to you over your broadband connection.

The picture quality and the response of the device is really damned good. Honestly I was surprised that the setup went so smoothly and that once I had my PIN number entered, the porn was streaming right away.

You can choose the video quality in a sort of a "good, better, best" arrangement. They equate the best to "DVD quality." While this is in principle true, my internet connection won't stream that much data that fast without artifacts and hiccoughs, but "Near DVD" looks really very good. I would say it looks much better than the highest quality recording on my Series2 TiVo. To date, my experience has been that once the video starts, it keeps playing.

The remote is OK. It seems that there is probably a better way to group the keys by function, but it does the job. Batteries were included, by the way.

The menus aren't as intuitive as an iPod or a TiVo, but again the service is in beta, so I doubt what I'm seeing today will be the final product. The issue I have is knowing which botton will take me back or up a level at which time. But I'm learning.

Features I haven't explored yet are the playlists and favorites. My understanding from the forums is that these are not "sticky" yet and still in development, so I am going to wait before I comment on those.

I'm happy to answer any questions, but if you are interested at all in the service then the web site is the place to go: FyreTV.com See also: Fyre TV FAQ

[+] Posted by Sinner, who was transgressing at the time (April 14, 2008 7:07 PM) by seeing evil. [+]