Adult film studio Vivid Entertainment said Monday that it will launch Google TV’s first sexually explicit app.
Vivid for Google TV will stream adult content that users can (and apparently must) subscribe to on Vivid.com, the company said.
Vivid didn’t say when the adult channel would be available, although it wasn’t on this reporter’s Logitech Revue at press time.
Google already offers a few apps—its Chrome browser, Pandora, and Twitter, among others—on the Google TV platform. However, that platform is also in the midst of a transition. Google said at the end of October that it was upgrading its Google TV platform to Android 3.1 or “Honeycomb”; that update was scheduled to take place with the Sony-branded Google TVs first, followed by the Logitech Revue set-top boxes soon after.
One of the benefits of the new Honeycomb Android OS was the access to Google’s Android Market, the company’s collection of online apps. Google has said previously that it will make a small subset of those apps available for Google TV, but that many would be optimized for the living room. It was not clear whether the Vivid app would fall under that category.
“Vivid for Google TV gives our fans a new way to enjoy Vivid movies in high quality HD and with other benefits that provide a very appealing, highly enjoyable, and user friendly experience,” said Steven Hirsch, co-founder and co-chairman of Vivid, in a statement. “It is a central part of our making Vivid available everywhere concept, which gives fans unified access to our content through their personal computers, mobile devices, tablets, television sets and DVD players.”
A video demonstration of the app on the Vivid Web site showed how users could select a particular actress or genre, including many XXX-rated parodies of popular films, such as the Spiderman series or The Hulk.
Google’s laissez-faire attitude toward porn is markedly different than that of Apple. Apple’s late chief executive, Steve Jobs, once claimed that the Apple iOS platform offered freedom from porn.
“Anyone can put up a Web site and optimize that Web site for different devices, including TVs,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “Users can lock out access to the browser on Google TV through a 4-digit PIN code that can be quickly set up by accessing the ‘Application Lock’ under ‘Privacy and Safety’ in System Settings. Alternatively, users can implement Safe Search for Google TV’s Chrome browser under the same ‘Privacy and Safety’ setting.”
At one time, the future of porn seemed to point towards innovations like the formatting of porn into 3D films or app stores like MiKandi for the Android market, which offered adult content for Android devices. In recent months, top-level domains like .XXX have potentially ushered in a red-light district for porn, which has already come under pressure from so-called “Tube” domains that stream short snippets of porn for free.
