Current Member for less than 1 month (at the time of review).
Pros:
- That feeling you get the very first time you log on as a member to the website of one of the older, classier purveyors of adult material who has shown the ability to combine eroticism, beauty, and proper cinematic techniques to create some of the better adult films in circulation since the '60s.
- Um...
- Not constant login requests like a few other big name sites.
- If a grad student were researching "how companies unintentionally encourage the pirating of their material" then I'd recommend visiting this website. I think it could be an extremely useful example.
Cons:
- 250KB/s max on a 6Mbps DSL connection. ~150KB/s most of the time.
- You're not allowed to queue downloads, so you'll only be able to get whatever you sit and monitor and click (and re-click when it fails) to download. Maybe you'll be able to get 8 scenes per day.. Maybe twelve?
- Constant "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" errors if you try to look at other pages after beginning a download. The site supposedly allows four connections, but I ran into trouble with less.
- Repeated "size mismatch" errors when using download managers.
- A laughably small collection of movies for a 50 year old company.
- 350 movies wouldn't be so bad if they were decent quality, but most are comparable to early 2000's VCDs. Yep. That poor. I'd estimate only 25% or so are HD.
- You'll be lucky to download the HD movies without the connection failing or the speed dropping to 0kbps, and, when it does, you'll be lucky to resume. If you can, guess what? You start over. Hooray
Bottom Line:
Videobox has almost 300 Private videos available, consistently fast connection speeds (600kbps+), and the .264 quality is better than Private.com's standard quality. Not to mention you can use download managers at VB and queue up dozens of movies to view later. It looks like they offer HD now, too, so there is absolutely no advantage to joining this site. It's a frustrating waste of money.
Seriously, don't do it. You'll be disappointed that the site even exists and you'll think to yourself, "Wow, I just wasted $30" or "I could've put that money towards a _______ membership."
*Newbie reviews and ratings don't count toward a site's overall score/rank until the user reaches the Rookie status level (5 points). This rule is needed to help prevent fake (or heavily biased) profiles and reviews.
User Comments (13)
Ask a question, give quick feedback, warnings, etc.
It's been over half a year since I got some very negative comments about this site. IT appears that TPB has given it a favorable review lately so I was wondering if the issues of past are gone?
They at least promise a good deal of HD videos on the previews page but I understood from some comments that Private is not producing much new material these days and the old ones obviously cannot ever be released as HD. It also appears that the old magazines are on another site these days. I guess there's no network membership to all Private offerings?
The comments below state that a lot has changed and the reviews are older than that. Anybody have a clue, is this site worth joining anymore? Do you get access to their large DVD selection or not (somebody commented about them trying to sell you films)?
DO NOT sign up for PRIVATE.COM! It has just been taken down and replaced with a NEW SITE that has almost NONE of the old content, but promises of the old content are still all over the signup and welcome pages. It is a flat-out bait-and-switch that just cost me $30.
How to make one of the best sites one of the worst
Private has managed to turn one of the best sites into one of the worst. How? Easy make navigation inscrutable, remove all the pictures that were some of the best on the internet and oh did I forget, slow the site down so that you can have a cup of coffee while simply moving from one page to the next. Yes, they really ruined this site. The removal of the incredible picture section is unbelievable. And I forget to mention the limited pictures they do still have cannot be individually downloaded with Mozilla, you have to download the anemic set as a zip file just to get the few pictures that are worth seeing. It looks like they are using the site to sell videos and have lost sight of their users. Not worth even a one month subscription.
Didn't feel like writing a full review, just wanted to note that this site is very disappointing. Though they do not have DRM anymore, and the ability to download a good portion of their magazine archive in pdf format is pretty interesting; the navigation is terrible (looking at the preview would lead you to believe the navigation is pretty good - but the navigation of the member area is very different and significantly worse). Also all their content is not available (yet?). I would not recommend joining this site, especially since a lot of their content is available elsewhere - videobox for example; unless you really want to download the magazine archive, which I guess might be worth it as the TBP price is pretty good.
I'm here to report, and respond to kirkwall's recent review.
There is no more DRM at Private. I decided to take a shot at this site, because they do have high quality material, but I didn't trust them.
While the site could use some improvement, contrary to what this reviewer claimed at the end of this August, there is no DRM whatsoever. Reading his review just now got me paranoid, because I was a member in August (he claims they have a "7 day DRM") so I ran a thorough check of what I downloaded (my membership is now expired). No DRM. I even ran a number of videos using Real Player, which wouldn't work with DRM---no problem. I even went so far as to convert a video into mpeg format---no problem.
The site could be better, no real search to speak of, and they need more of their massive library there. But a Private site without DRM is a good site.
I've been waiting to join this site, they have many videos of some of my favorites including Eve Angel, Simony Diamond and Black Angelica, but one of the newer reviews says the DRM is still there, the other newer review says no DRM. Is there anyway, since the webmistress is active, that you can say the DRM is not on the movies, no tricks or explain why two reviews made within a week of each other have completely different points about the DRM?
I ask because I know of another site that was using DRM, and I wasn't seeing it when I was a member. Posted a review of no DRM, then another member said there was DRM. It was the difference in file types we downloaded, the site still had DRM on their WMV files (what the other member was downloading), but none on the AVI files (what I was downloading).
Also, on the join page, this is a little confusing "Tag Undefined offer01r$" and has a tick button beside of it. I do see that it says "$19.95 special offer" but have no idea what that quoted part means. Thanks.
After the most recent comment from the Webmaster regarding changes in the site, I attempted to subscribe through to the link provided by TBP. It didn't work because it rejected my CC, supposedly because the CVV2 No. was incorrect. I tried a couple of times making sure that it was right, and it still didn't work. I have used the card in the last week for other things, and had no problems. What most disappoints me, however, is the fact that I received no response from an e-mail I sent to the site, as well as the lack of any response here to my comments earlier. I was really looking forward to checking out the changes described by the Webmaster since I am a big fan of the studio, but it seems their problems with customer service and unresponsiveness noted by others here continue.
I've been told that Private has discontinued the evil DRM technology.
Can anyone here confirm this?
Well, I just took a look inside the site and they do have a banner that states "No DRM'. That would be a great thing, why don't I trust it? LOL
OK---I went back in, and it seems to me the downloads are their videos. And you have to purchase the download, for at least $18.95! But it has no DRM. Looks like they just won't let go of the sucker born every minute mentality that has polluted porn for so long.
I would have expected more professional treatment from such a long-standing site, but you never know. I joined in October when they had a 2-month for $25 deal, which I thought made the site worth checking out. With DRM on their vids and crappy navigation on their pics, I had no interest in sticking around longer than that and cancelled using their site. The site confirmed my cancellation, though I did not receive an e-mail confirmation, which is pretty common - not getting an e-mail confirmation, that is. I was sure I was all set until I received my credit card statement this past weekend and saw that they had charged me an additional $30.54 US. I filled out the "Contact us" form on the site - no response. I sent an e-mail to an e-mail address that I had when a C/S person had responded promptly to an issue during my membership - no response.
Apparently, they're OK with you giving them money and resolving password issues while you're OK with giving them money, but they don't mind ripping people off and they don't respond to people that they have ripped off. I'm fucking pissed about it.
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