Channel 1 Releaseing

The most disappointing site of the year for me so far is C1R. C1R stands for Channel 1 Releasing and it’s porn director Chi Chi LaRue’s site. At a glance, this site appears to be huge and packed with all sorts of excitement from movies to pics to blogs to live shows. A closer look, however, reveals that a great deal of this site is dedicated to selling DVDs and pay per view. There are trailers of DVDs for sale, press releases, blogs available on the tour as well as listings of events and shows and appearances at local clubs.

The C1R menu is the same in the member area and the tour. It’s on the left side of the page and is packed with stuff that aren’t really content. Links to advertising, Channel 1 Store and Video On Demand make the menu complicated to navigate since all most of us really want are videos and pics.

First off listed on the left is a collection of links to Live and Raw. This is Chi Chi’s own live feed, and it’s pretty well known. There is a schedule and it appears there are 5 Live and Raw shows per week as well Dirk Yates Live on Sundays. For those of us who happen to log in when there is no live show happening, there’s always a rerun with sound playing when you click Watch Now, but these are pretty low quality. There are also literally hundreds of reruns of the Live and Raw shows available to members by clicking the L&R On Demand link.

C1R’s L&R On Demand offers up name-brand pornstars as well as other horny men. You can browse by name or by episode in a huge dropdown menu. The catch is that these videos are not only low quality, with a low bitrate and jerky action, but they also have no sound. I thought maybe the issue was on my end so I had someone else log in from their computer and there was no sound for them, either.

Still in search of movies, I clicked the Movies link in the galleries section and was taken to a page of feature film covers leading to more pages. It looked like I had hit the motherlode – 76 movies were listed. But when I clicked them, each turned out to be only pics from the movies, and medium-sized average or below quality pics, at that.

I did find 8 videos inside the Chi Chi TV section – but they weren’t porn. One is a safe sex public service announcement, another is highlights from one of Chi Chi’s birthday parties and most of the rest are short clips from male dance contests held in clubs.

So far, we’re talking about a pretty small amount of content – and I must admit, I was expecting much more, partly because their tour makes it look like there IS more and partly because Chi Chi has made so many movies that I expected to find some inside the site.

Let me quickly go through what I found on C1R. 1 live show per day 6 days per week with chat – and when the live shows aren’t happening, there’s a rerun playing. There is no live show on Friday – instead there’s a movie. There is a huge archive of Live and Raw shows, but they have no sound. There’s a chat board where you can leave comments for Chi Chi or talk about the live shows. There is a fairly good sized collection of photo sets of exclusive models, featured models plus pics from the movies and these are medium sized and average quality or below. There are 8 non-porn videos in Chi Chi TV and 5 eZines including Freshmen, Men and Unzipped.

Most of the rest of what I found in the member area was also available for free on the tour – things like blogs – and a good deal of the rest is either publicity for Chi Chi and C1R or else is advertising for products. I searched and searched for movies, but if they’re there, I was unable to find them – and believe me, I looked.

C1R starts off with overcomplicated navigation, adds massive advertising for DVDs and pay per view videos. There are 2 live shows offered for a total of 6 live shows per week. There is are several fairly good sized pics collections, but the tiny thumbs and average quality pics leave room for improvement. There’s no update schedule and the site videos are replays of live shows – albeit that there are a lot of them – with no sound and a bitrate that may be normal for live shows but is pretty low for video content. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Unless you’re a die-hard Chi Chi LaRue fan, C1R is one site I definitely can’t recommend.