Google TV Swings Into the Porn Business

Vivid's pornographic parodies include Spider-man, The Hulk, and The Brady Bunch.

Image: Vivid Entertainment Group

As Internet behemoths Apple and Google enter the battle for our television sets, it was only a matter of time before one of them followed up-and-comer Boxee’s lead and got into the porn business. Thank you to Google for obliging.

Vivid Entertainment today announced it will launch a Vivid app, or channel, for the Google TV set-top device. Cofounder and cochairman of Vivid, Steven Hirsch said the channel is the first, “true Internet system that includes 24/7 access and constantly streaming moving content.” Vivid, which says it spends big on actors and production to create upscale porn, spent over a year developing the code base for the channel, says Hirsch. He describes the finished product as a “a friendly interface for the consumer that can be used with the current Google TV technology."

Porn aficionados who are already Vivid.com subscribers are in luck. The service will be included at no extra charge, along with the existing package of traditional adult films, pornographic parodies, celebrity sex tapes, and all the other goodies we won’t go into here.

Google won’t be publicizing the app on the Android Market, according to Tech Crunch's Robin Wauters. “Presumably,” he writes, “you’ll have to enable non-Market downloads and obtain Vivid’s app on your own."

Porn, it would seem, is the dirty little skeleton Internet television is more than happy to keep in its closet.

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