Life on The EdgeXD

Some folks have expressed their confusion over our use of the word “channels” to describe our themed playlists. To understand what the hell we were thinking, it’s necessary to journey back twenty or thirty years to the time when cable TV was first being rolled out successfully across the US. This was going to be the great Entertainment Liberator, the electronic Simón Bolívar (look it up!), promising 100 to 150 channels. And if that wasn’t enough (and it wasn’t), satellite TV came along and promised hundreds more. Never mind that you had to plant one of those enormous fugly dishes in your backyard (or, much later, a smaller fugly dish atop your garage), there was diverse video entertainment to be consumed, and, by all that was holy, we Americans were going to consume it!

It was all about bandwidth, the newly elevated-to-priest-caste techies told us. The more bandwidth there was, the more choices we were all supposed to have. We watched with widening eyes as the cables got fatter, the satellite transponders got digitally widened, the set-top boxes became sophisticated mini-computers, and, still, we waited. One day we woke up, and like a three-card monte’s mark grasping for his 20 dollar bill, we realized we’d been had. Variety and diversity, we learned to our horror, meant the addition of channels devoted to long-canceled TV shows, the Game Show Network, and about thirty different movie channels distinguishable only by their on-air graphics’ degree of annoying intrusiveness. The revolution had come, alright, but if it was being televised, you sure wouldn’t know it by all the crappy programming.

Maybe it was that un-reported palace coup that occurred just after the turn of the century, the one where the techies were over-thrown, exiled back to their server farms by the Marketing wonks. Sure, our new overlords cleaned up nicer and wrote in complete sentences, but any notions of providing consumers with entertainment that might actually have some risk were thrown out in favor of “strengthening the brand.” I can’t speak for you, of course, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to live in a country where the Celebrity Shopping Network is a strong brand.

The worst, the most neglected – it should come as no surprise – were the porn channels. All that fiber, all those satellites, all that sophisticated electronics, for what? A channel devoted to Jenna Jameson? Please! That’s not choice, that’s a punchline! Cable companies, whose only regular creative challenge lies in choosing the color for their bowling league shirts, may be excused for lacking any imagination, but the networks could have tried harder. And we aficionados of adult entertainment, watching the self-serving and anorexic attempts by Playboy and their occasionally spirited but equally clueless imitators to extend their brand at the expense of providing the deeper and more varied kind of porn that was begging to be brought to a wider audience cried out as one, “I could do better!”

And that’s a bit of the inspiration behind EdgeXD’s “Channels.”

We may not be up on satellite (yet), but that doesn’t stop us from presenting a diverse blend of niche adult entertainment feeds, all themed to both rekindle old fantasies and stoke new ones. Some of the channels are clear hat-tips to some of the more traditional adult entertainment sub-genres: “Geisha-On-Demand” is all-Asian, “Innocence Lost” is what the industry has termed “18+/Barely Legal,” and “Ipanema Overdrive” covers Latina and Brazilian stars. But we’re most excited about what I guess we can call our sub-sub-genres, the porn themes that fan our curiosity or reach down deeper and nudge the fantasies we’d almost forgotten we had. Sex in cars, trains, and boats (“Sex Drive”), the clips which explore student-teacher relationships (“Extra Credit”), the use of sex toys (“Some Assembly Required”), and the shenanigans which we just know are going on behind the pulled drapes at the house of the MILF down the block (“Home Schooled”). There’s plenty more where those came from, and we’re adding new channels all the time.

It’s the kind of choice and selection you thought you were buying into when the cable company starting digging up your streets, before you realized that it was really just all about selling more bunny-heads to hang from rearview mirrors.

Next time: Because we’re really not the porn super-geniuses we tell our wives we are, I’ll be writing about how EdgeXD has empowered its subscribers to create and distribute their own channels!