Las Vegas- [wired.com]- There’s a long tradition of porn conventions being held simultaneously with technology conventions here in Las Vegas.

I stopped by at the Adult Entertainment Expo this morning, where I wove my way through the silicone and cellulite in search of tech gear. Amidst the various strange implements on display was FyreTV, which is like an ethernet-connected cable box… for porn.

I was skeptical. Why would anyone pay ten bucks per month and use dedicated hardware for something that’s available for free over the internet? FyreTV made a good case for their product though, and it goes something like this.

The device is an innocuous looking little black box (it ships without the sticker visible in the picture); in order to identify it, you’d need to own one yourself. The box sits near your television, where it must be connected with wired ethernet, and costs nothing. $10 per month gets you access to the full FyreTV catalog, currently comprised of about 20K titles from Wicked Entertainment and other studios.

There’s no hard drive on the device; titles stream at 1.5 MB/sec (full DVD quality), 1.1 MB/sec, or 700 Kbps, depending on how fast your connection is. You can choose between aspect ratios of 4:3 or 16:9, and outputs include HDMI, S-Video, component, and composite.

You can search titles using all manner of racy keywords, and then apply filters to the search results. In the demonstration, a FyreTV spokesperson found 922 results for “blonde,” so he filtered by buxomness.

But the most compelling aspect of the service is the way FyreTV staff have tagged every scene from every movie in their catalog with keywords. After searching or browsing your way to a scene that looks interesting, you can add it to a playlist with one click of the included remote to create a customized mix. If one of the scenes really does it for you, you can jump from there to the entire movie. And despite the streaming nature of this beast, FyreTV lets you fast forward and rewind at speeds of up to 24x.

Unlike its competition (which FyreTV says codes clunky interfaces using HTML), the company built its super slick interface from scratch using a Linux base. Ironically, the Adult Entertainment Expo doesn’t allow vendors to show sex scenes, but the company’s PG-13 demo video achieved DVD video quality on a 1080p display.

Currently, FyreTV has five thousand beta testers, and plans to send out another five thousand of the boxes in advance of the late January/early February launch date.