Adult Empire Review: Unlimited Access to a Truly Massive Porn Library

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The claims thrown at you from the get-go on Adult Empire are pretty crazy: 165,000 movies here, alongside 700,000 clips – all of which are adult.

Now the important thing to realize when it comes to Adult Empire is that they’re doing things a little differently from most modern porn megasites. This platform is a fusion of free streaming (similar to tubes), purchasable VODs and DVDs. The big question is whether or not this approach to porn consumption still has a place in the modern era of content access.

The site launched in January of 2008 (formerly known as Adult DVD Empire), so with 15+ years of being alive and kicking, they’re doing something right. We signed up for their monthly Unlimited subscription to check out the good, bad and ugly.

Here’s our full Adult Empire review:

Adult Empire Review: DVD to Porn Streaming Giant

Adult Empire Review (Unlimited subscription)

Adult Empire (https://adultempire.com) has evolved from an adult DVD retailer to an industry-leading adult VOD service.

As well as offering physical DVD deliveries in the US and internationally, customers can choose to watch adult movies online from one of the world’s most impressive porn libraries.

Predictably, this is where the real growth is… as a porn streaming service.

Adult Empire competes directly with popular rival sites such as AEBN, and Adult Time. And while it lacks the glossy high-end feel of Adult Time, it boasts a much larger content library. Adult Empire’s ability to secure licensing agreements with various content providers, studios, and adult film producers is perfect for the porn connoisseur who values an abundance of choice over a few heavily-marketed original series.

The award-winning site has won the AVN Best Retail Website Award a staggering 14 times, most recently in 2021 as well as the XBiz Adult Site of the Year (VOD) for the last six years on the bounce!

First Impressions

When we landed on Adult Empire’s homepage, we were invited to create an account to gain 15 free minutes of streaming content. You have to hand over your email address, but we appreciate the fact that they’re willing to let you try before you buy.

Adult Empire freebie deal

There were no catches with this offer: we didn’t have to provide a credit card or sign up for a trial or anything: just 15 minutes to spend however you wish. At this point, it’s probably a good idea to talk about the setup and structure of Adult Empire – since it’s quite a bit different from what you might be used to.

You can access the bulk of the content on Adult Empire with minutes that you purchase ahead of time. Packages range from 50 to 6,000: when you watch content for a minute, you spend a minute.

In some instances, minutes are spent at a higher rate – for instance, 1.5 minutes per minute instead of 1 (we even found 2.5 in some cases). We dislike this system on multiple levels, but in particular, because of the premium pricing that some content has. Generally speaking, the latest releases are 1.5 minutes per minute.

Is Adult Empire Unlimited Worth It?

If you don’t like buying minutes, you can opt for their Unlimited offer. With this option, you’ll have access to over 700,000 scenes – no extra costs are associated with your access. This also removes all advertisements, offers 4K quality releases and you get additional discounts on their toys and DVDs.

We’re going to make an informed decision here and look at Adult Empire from the perspective of someone who’s going to sign up for their Unlimited service. It makes the most economic sense and aligns with how most people prefer to watch content online.

We’ll discuss the cost of minutes in the billing section, but for now – we’ll look at the monthly access package as your primary means of consuming content on Adult Empire.

Channels: Great Coverage, Poor Design

Most of what you’ll find on Adult Empire comes from third-party studios that allow the platform to show its content.

Over the years, paysites have mixed and matched their output in various forms – many scenes from your favorite studios end up in DVDs, and it seems as if this DVD access approach is very much the way that Adult Empire likes to display its media.

We’re not massive fans of this style: the way that Adult Time showcases content seems far more intuitive.

Examples of channels on Adult Empire

The scene in the bottom left is a good example of how major paysites can reuse their media: Moms Bang Teens is a studio that belongs to Reality Kings, and you can access this specific release if you’re a member at RK.

When we click on this scene, there’s no quick way to find more of the same: you’ll have to manually search “Moms Bang Teens” to see their complete collection on the platform.

Other well-known studios with a presence here include Team Skeet, Pure Taboo, Elegant Angel, Digital Sin and Brazzers—no shortage whatsoever when it comes to big names that create cracking content.

The structure is our biggest complaint – they have the channels that people want to see, but finding what you want can be a little uncomfortable.

Videos

Quantity

Adult Empire is currently sitting on a massive 1.25 million videos.

To say that this is a lot of porn is an understatement – rivals such as Adult Time only come in with around 60,000, which is still a lot, but Adult Empire has 20 times that number.

We added up the numbers from the last 30 uploads to get a rough idea of the average video length here: the shortest was 8 minutes, the longest was 1 hour and 9 minutes.

On average, we found that a scene at Adult Empire is 34 minutes and 5 seconds long. This is just a small sample test, but we want to make it clear that these aren’t short releases. You’re looking at over 600,000 hours of porn: that’s close to 70 years of watching 24/7.

Dozens of fresh uploads are added to the database daily, too: good luck keeping up with the influx of new porn videos provided by Adult Empire. You can check their X feed (AdultEmpire) for the latest content additions.

Quality

A quick caveat ahead of time: because a lot of media from Adult Empire was created in the 2000s and 2010s, don’t expect the archive to be completely filled with 1080p and 4K uploads. That said, a lot of the recent material – which we think most people are going to want – is offered in 4K.

Around 75% of the latest 200 uploads had a 4K option.

A further caveat: different studios use different bitrates, but we were pretty happy with the typical upload that we found. Here’s an example:

Adult Empire stream quality test

This 4K streaming video comes in at 17 Mb/s, which is more than sufficient for our needs. We found the lowest bitrate was 13.5 Mb/s out of a dozen videos we sampled, with most being around the 16 Mb/s mark. You can watch in 1080p if you’d prefer: we found bitrates between 4 Mb/s and 7 Mb/s.

We should make it clear that all of this information pertains to streaming. The downloads that you’ll get are the same, but since you have to pay for downloads, it’s important for this to be clarified. You don’t receive lower-quality media just because you choose to stream scenes from Adult Empire.

Download Speed

Thanks to a gigabit connection we have access to, putting Adult Empire through the paces wasn’t that difficult. We downloaded three different 4K quality videos from the platform and found that a 6 GB file took roughly 1 minute and 30 seconds to complete. This equates to around 66 MB/s. We want to stress that this is megabytes, not megabits.

If you do decide to download a lot from Adult Empire, we can all but guarantee that your connection will be the bottleneck – not theirs. Gigabit connections are relatively uncommon, but we’re pleased that Adult Empire has the bandwidth to handle this type of connection if you’ve got one.

The stream environment was pretty decent: you can easily skip through parts of the footage with minimal downtime. It feels responsive, and while that doesn’t matter too much to Unlimited users, it will matter for those who are paying per minute.

Content Analysis

Where can you even start with a platform like Adult Empire?

It’s incredibly difficult for us to look at the content objectively – especially since there are hundreds of studios, thousands of stars and an ungodly number of orgasms to sift through. There really is something for everyone here.

Most material is suitable to the everyman: hardcore vanilla content where chicks and dicks collide. Niches are typical of the porn industry – you’ll find content here for those who like Asians, BBWs, interracial sex, anal, gangbangs, lesbian interactions and so on. There are more specific projects, too: we found clips on Adult Empire devoted to girls with muscular bodies, plenty of old-school midget flicks, and even clown-themed titles.

Adult Empire niche content

Some pornstars have over 1,000 scenes at Adult Empire. Names that tick this box include the likes of Tory Lane, Nina Hartley, Jada Fire, India Summer and Katja Kassin.

It shouldn’t surprise you that the big ticket names also have a decent chunk of media for you to chow down on: we found 193 scenes for Lana Rhoades, 758 for Riley Reid and 474 for Alexis Fawx.

Make no mistake: Adult Empire is one of the best destinations to binge on the back-catalog of your favorite A-list porn stars.

Original Content

What about porn movies created in-house?

Adult Empire has a very small collection of originally produced media. These are shoots with some pretty big names: in fact, it seems clear that they only wanted to produce with the best of the best. We could only find 13 DVDs in total in the On Demand section, though each one had 3-4 scenes.

We spent some time looking at the releases from Megan Rain and Scarlet Red: pretty decent stuff. Megan was real young in these shoots too – if you want to see the best of this babe when she was barely legal, definitely check out that original.

Virtual Reality

Plenty of VR scenes are available, so if you’ve got a headset and want to dive into some virtual reality adult material – Adult Empire can provide. Several different studios have come together to provide the 5,000+ VR scenes offered here, including the likes of Wet VR, Lethal Hardcore VR, Grooby VR and Virtual X Porn. They are not major players in the space, admittedly, but they are nice to have nonetheless.

Most of the VR scenes here are 180 degree: there are a few that run at 360 degrees. Quality for the most recent videos is 8K, whereas older virtual reality media goes up to 4K.

We tried 4 scenes and all of them were offered at 60 FPS. Supported devices include Oculus, VIVE, Gear and PlayStation. Note that there’s nothing special about the files – they’re just optimized for your headset.

Sadly, you cannot get any VR content from AdultEmpire via the Unlimited plan. Instead, you have to buy the scenes here. Prices range from around $5 to $15 per scene, depending on the release date, length and models involved.

Adult Empire doesn’t have streaming functionality for VR by the looks of things: each scene has to be downloaded. This is quite a bit different from a platform like Adult Time, where it’s possible to stream their VR in resolutions up to and including 4K.

Design & Navigation

Adult Empire has a pretty complicated – and annoying – setup.

There are multiple areas of the sites for different types of users, making navigating through the media they have more complicated than it needs to be. We’ve covered the per-minute, Unlimited and VR options – buying full DVDs here and even having them delivered to you is possible.

Some DVDs cannot be purchased, some cannot be streamed, and some videos are included with Unlimited – some aren’t. This can complicate navigating around the site’s different areas and finding what you want.

We highly recommend using the ‘On Demand’ dropdown and navigating through to the ‘Unlimited’ section: this is where you’ll see everything that you can actually watch. You can then select ‘clips’ to have a pretty traditional content view. We’re not convinced that the DVD approach is the best method, but alas, we won’t dwell on it…

The embedded player is more than fit for purpose. If we had to complain about anything – having to click twice to bring up the various resolutions is a bit annoying. It should be like YouTube, where you click on the cog and instantly transition between the available formats.

Adult Empire porn star selection

We like the pornstar page: pretty simple to find your favorite girl and all of the scenes that she has. The platform also has advanced filtering on the left-hand side so that you can pick hair color, breast size, ethnicity and so on.

There are over 17,000 pornstars in total (8,500 white, 1,400 Latina, 1,000 Asian, 800 ebony and some non-specified).

Loading times are good. Our biggest complaint is that when you browse the website on a 1440p monitor, the thumbnail quality for some scenes can be quite low. This was because the site rendered 320 x 180 pixel previews in a 463 x 260 pixel area.

Thumbnails shouldn’t be upsized like this – it makes the site unattractive.

The Mobile Experience

The Adult Empire design team has done the best they can with the mobile website, but because they’re working with the same setup as the desktop version – well, it could be better.

We want to make it clear here that the design, as a matter of the structure of the platform, isn’t bad per se – it’s the financing and content access structure that causes the issues. There isn’t a real solution to this problem except to do away with the whole DVD purchasing side of things and stick to a simple, convenient setup with Unlimited being their only product.

Adult Empire mobile browser view (horizontal)

Truth be told, we were somewhat impressed at the sizing of the links and dropdown areas when you navigate the website horizontally. Most platforms don’t have this approach to responsiveness, but the site felt much better to use on a mobile device when you turn it sideways.

This would be our recommended method of accessing Adult Empire on your mobile.

Billing Information

So with Unlimited, you get access to 780,000 scenes – that’s a decent chunk of the 1.25 million they have in total. This is a per-month fee, and you can choose to subscribe for 1, 3, or 12 months. You get a much better deal if you sign up for a year in advance – it works out to be just $12.5 per month.

You can only subscribe using a credit or debit card. Visa, Mastercard, JCB, Diner’s Club and Discover all work.

We don’t recommend buying minutes, but if you do want to, packages range from 50 ($9.99) to 6,000 ($499.99). The only situation where this really makes sense is if you’re massively strapped for time and can only watch porn for, say, an hour a month.

But even then, that’s an hour for $5. Considering that a lot of the best material here also comes in at 2.5 minutes per minute (we know, dumb system!), it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

If you buy DVDs and have them delivered, you can pay with PayPal, Bitcoin, check/money orders and standard credit/debit cards. They also support gift cards, so if you’ve got one from Walmart, Best Buy or another large retailer – they’ll work on Adult Empire.

Free shipping is provided if you spend over $25, with a bonus gift at $75.

How Will Adult Empire Purchases Appear on My Statement?

You’ll be billed by DVD Empire Web when you make a purchase.

If you Google the phrase without quotes, you’ll be shown a mainstream website called DVD Empire. If you Google the phrase with quotes – results do come up in Google that point toward it being an adult purchase. We’d like to see a slightly more discreet billing reference here.

We’d describe Adult Empire’s billing as semi-discreet.

Our Verdict: The Perfect Porn Library, Just Lacking Polish

Adult Empire verdict

There is a huge amount of content here, and the site has many gadgets and gizmos, features and tools you can use. We think that for our readers, focusing purely on Unlimited offer is the best way to look at the platform. Do people really buy DVDs any more? Are they paying per-minute?

We’re unconvinced, and because of that, we’re only going to judge this place on the subscription service it has.

The archive is massive, the range of content is incredible – it has more porn than pretty much any other platform we’ve ever reviewed. It also loads quickly, and once you get to the Unlimited area, it’s not that hard to get around. We love high bitrates on 4K scenes too.

Our biggest criticisms are: no ability to download content, a relatively complicated website setup, inferior DVD-style content display (as opposed to channels) and a limited trial.

Adult Empire is good – especially if you like mixing up the content that you consume. It loses a few points for its DVD and per-minute nonsense, but with 800,000 scenes – many of which are in 4K – it’s not hard to see the benefits of joining a place like this.

Check out AdultEmpire.com for access to one of the world’s largest porn libraries.

AUTHOR PROFILE

Simon Regal

Simon Regal is the editor and founder of AdultVisor, with a decade of experience covering the adult entertainment industry. Simon's background includes collaborations with two pioneering adult studios at the forefront of VR tech. His work has been featured in Men's Health, Vice and TechCrunch. Simon is a regular attendee on the adult conference circuit, making appearances at XBiz, The European Summit and AdultCon in 2023. Say hello if you see him!
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