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| Content Quantity: |
19/20 |
Content Quality: |
15/20 |
Updates: |
10/10 |
| Entertainment: |
13/15 |
Navigation & Design: |
7/10 |
Download: |
2/5 |
| Value for Money: |
10/15 |
Reviewer's Tilt: |
2/5 |
Total: |
78/100 |
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MovieBeast offers members a large and varied collection of mostly hardcore videos in more than 20 different categories. Unfortunately the site is marred by confusing video sorting, segmented downloads with no full movie option, low video quality and last but certainly not least, a hefty membership price tag some ten bucks above the norm.
Some of these issues might be somewhat forgivable on smaller niche sites, but they are hard to look past on a video mega site like MovieBeast - a category of sites with competition that's extremely hard to beat, or just match, even with sites much better than this one.
(Read the full review below)
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| Visit MovieBeast |
Hardcore Meters
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Site info help
Site info valid on date of review
| Video: |
1560 (approx. 10-40 minutes each)
Windows Media (wmv) available (a few videos are in mpeg format)
Highest quality: wmv 320x240, 700 kbit
No DRM protection |
| Pricing: |
1 month recurring: $39.95
3 day trial: $1.95 |
When I first stopped by this large movie site about a month ago it was taking an unusual but quite interesting approach to memberships and payment, skipping the common pay-per-month practice in favor of a system resembling pay-per-view where you could buy credits that would give you a set number of Megabytes or Gigabytes to download.
While maybe not the best value for money deal for serious porn addicts (who, me?), it seemed like a pretty good system for people who don't necessarily watch porn for an hour or several every day.
Looks like there have been some changes at MovieBeast since then as they have now moved to the common membership approach with unlimited downloads (there's still a link on the site to a "premium" upgrade plan, mentioning extra credits, bonus content etc., but I assume they just forgot to remove that one).
Good thing or bad thing? Well, let's try to figure that out, but for now I'm inclined to say that viewed on its own merits, MovieBeast looks like a pretty decent site (albeit pretty pricy), but switching to this payment model puts it more directly up against the couple of (cheaper) giants sitting heavily at the top of the Downloadable DVDs category - and that's not an easy fight at all for any porn site offering stock hardcore content in a number of different niches.
But is the content at MovieBeast in fact the same licensed DVD stuff from popular porn studios that you find at similar sites? Well, I've at least in passing seen a lot of the 1000+ DVDs that seems to be commonly floating around for Internet use and I must say that I don't immediately recognize any of what I see at MovieBeast, so I'm inclined to say that they are getting their videos from other sources, something that definately puts them in a stronger position.
So let's look at this content though. The site reports having 1560 videos for a total of around 400 hours - I'll have to take their word for it as overlapping categories make it hard to count and verify. They do have a whole lot either way - and they seem to be adding a new one just about every day.
The videos are split into around 20 categories or niches, and aside from things like anal, blonde, blowjob, gangbang, lesbian and hardcore (that's not really a category as much as a quality, is it?), you'll also find things like bizarre (which is generally not bizarre at all), fetish (a bit of bondage, latex etc.), milf, smoking and bisexual (which in porn usually seems to mean two or more guys in the scene are also having sex, but at MovieBeast apparantly just covers a good old threesome with one guy and two girls).
The number of videos in each category varies from a good handful up to a couple of hundred, with niches like anal and gangbang being surprisingly understocked while the masturbation category holds no less than 175 videos - many of them actual lesbian or guy/girl scenes. Similar misplacements hold true for several of the other categories.
So big confusion then? Yep, pretty much, which is a shame considering the overall design of the site is actually pretty neat and the search and sorting features certainly have the potential to be great - it's just not used very effectively here.
It didn't make things any better either that I have regularly been getting error messages on some of the pages as data or thumbnail images apparantly couldn't be read properly. I can't rule out these errors are just a fluke though, technical problems do happen occasionally for just about any web site, and often they are short lived.
Moving on to another important aspect of a video site, the technical quality of the videos.
Let's first get a related annoyance out of the way - you will have to download movies in segments, typically four to seven. There's no option to download the full movies in one file. MovieBeast certainly isn't the only porn site guilty of this offense, but that doesn't make it any more excusable, and given that I still consider it in fairly direct competion with sites like VideosZ and VideoBox - despite using different content - this is another pretty serious issue.
The quality then? Windows Media (wmv) and occasionally mpeg files in 320x240, 700 kbit - which is to say, watchable but not great at all.
Now that all boiled down to a whole lot of criticism and all together made MovieBeast appear like a pretty crappy site. Is it actually that bad?
Well, as I started out saying, viewed on its own MovieBeast is actually a pretty decent site - despite the problems. The video collection is very impressive, the content is generally pretty hot (although, as commendable as skipping the usual stock DVD content is, I generally found myself looking mostly in vain for really interesting and standout movies) and new movies are added what appears to be daily.
I don't view porn sites as isolated entities though - I compare them to others of a similar type, directly or indirectly, and MovieBeast just doesn't stack up to the best of the large multi-niche movie sites, even if the category confusion got sorted out, the video quality got a boost etc.
Yes, it does appear it's not based on licensed DVD content like the others, but that doesn't really make the content any more interesting (for me actually a little less as mentioned above, although admittedly that could easily be down to personal preferences), and in this case doesn't do a whole lot to improve the overall impression of the site.
And neither does the huge $39.95 a month price tag.
Click here to visit MovieBeast
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95+ Excellent
85-94 Very Good
75-84 Good
65-74 Acceptable
-64 Don't Bother
Full rating info here
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