First Impressions: FyreTV Beta IPTV

It’s just been several months since FyreTV was officially announced at AEE 2008. As promised the company rolled out their first batch of Beta units recently. 

Below you will find pics of the unboxing of the Beta unit. For those who are HDMI-equipped, FyreTV includes a HDMI cable for your widescreen pleasure. First off, I was really impressed how small the unit is, which can easily be stowed away inside a cabinet. Furthermore, it’s very non-descriptive as it doesn’t look like an ‘adult’ product!

 

I won’t lie that the installation is hassle-free although others may have a better experience. For me, I had to do some tweaking on my broadband router with regards to TCP and UDP ports since when I first ran a movie, the video was very choppy. Although my internet-dedicated speed was 1.3 Mbps, I could only play the movie in the lowest setting, HQ, without the film being choppy. 

 

Now, the user interface is quite good for a beta product, but unfortunately, the remote control is very confusing and I hope in the commercial release they do something about that. After turning on the unit, there will be a screen prompt asking for your security PIN to prevent others from watching your stash of streaming porn. So, in terms of navigating the content, it’s very intuitive as the screens below suggest. One nice feature is that once you select a scene it has several thumbnail pictures of the action so you can decide to play it or not. The GUI is far from perfect as it can be very frustrating inputting letters when spelling a star’s name. I suggest that there should be a predictive interface that allows you to view matching letters so you don’t have to press search all the time. Also, it’s a hassle when you spell a star’s name incorrectly and you have to input the letters quickly  before the interface kicks you off from the search field. 

 

The video quality can be customized per the settings menu, which you can toggle between HQ, Near DVD Quality, and DVD Quality depending on your Internet broadband speed. For the most part, the audio/visual quality aspect was very good, but it all depends on the source material since some videos were washed out. Just to give you an idea, the HQ looked much better than VHS and a little inferior to DVD.  

In summary, I do think FyreTV is where adult is heading, but I would like to withhold final judgment until FyreTV works on its upgrades to the firmware and overall experience. As always content is king and FyreTV has signed some heavy hitters like Elegant Angel, Wicked Pictures, Red Light District Video, Ninn Worx_SR among the others. If they can get more Grade A companies to sign, then this will be a hit! Only time will tell.

Strengths: No more hiding your secret stash of porn, adult-on-demand, slick GUI, and small footprint for unit

Weaknesses: Some bugs in the system need to be ironed out, you need high bandwidth as in FiOS to get the very highest quality, current and scheduled pricing system may turn potential users off, and crappy remote control