Reviewed 2013-03-27 l Last update on 2020-09-27
Homegrown Video has been on the go since 1982 and has won adult industry awards for its websites. Here it is showing you Homegrown Anal, and there's no award for guessing what the theme of this site is. On the tour you are invited to make money by sending in your own pics and tapes, or you can just take one of the well-priced memberships and access all the amateur videos that are available in the members' area. From there you can also join in the Community and take advantage of your network.
So, arriving at the home page, I was met with the sight of several sexy looking amateur women all taking cocks up their asses. Perfect, exactly what I was hoping for. The home page looks a bit different to the tour and there is a top menu. Then you have square sample shots from some of the videos, a big link to take you to the network, links to live cams and the recently added videos. I went to the Latest Videos tab in the main menu to do a content check.
OK, this looked exactly the same as the home page and I did feel that the design could do with a shake-up, but more about that later. Here were the first 24 videos from the collection of 344 dating back 434 days ago. Each one is shown with a square sample, its rate and date (in days ago) and title. You can also see the number of views and these were in the hundreds, making me think that his content is being viewed regularly and membership numbers are decent. That's good news as it should mean the site and network will continue to thrive.
What did bug me for a while was the slow loading pages. There's this currently being watched section at the top which is not only repetitive but it seems to slow down the loading of the index pages. Your content is a scroll away down the page.
But: when you find a clip you want to see, you simply click on the image and open the viewing page. Each of these pages has a stream and download options, plus some interactive stuff we'll look at later. The quality varies, and though there may be files up to 1,600 kbps @ 640 x 480 here, this is home produced content and so we can't expect HD or even DVD quality all the way through. There were choices for the Flash stream of low, medium and high, and downloads for WMV also in three qualities. Clips ran for various lengths of time, up to 20 minutes in some cases, and they were all varied.
You have to remember that the theme here is homemade and amateur so not only is the quality going to be varied but so are the models. Ordinary couples can be found alongside young and spunky couples, there are threesomes, there are close ups and there are grainy long shots as well. There are even some scenes here that look like they come from studios. Whether they do or not is up to you to decide but there is no doubt that you also have a lot of home produced content to view and there are plenty of things to download.
There are galleries as well, and over in the Photos area I found 32 photo sets with various amounts of content in each. Again the quality may vary here as will the actual content, but there is no doubt that most, if not all, of this content is self-submit style and comes from genuine amateurs and couples. Oh, and in case you were wondering; a lot of it does actually feature anal sex.
My main gripe about the set-up here was the fact that the pages were very slow to load. When you click through you can alter the way you see the pages, there is a choice of two types of view; but both of them took a long time to bring up all the sample images and neither of them looked very different from the other. I also found the design old fashioned and not at all up to date, with square sample pics and lots of white space. There was nothing very glamorous about the site and it, like its content, looked vary amateur and homemade.
The galleries are a bit cumbersome to navigate as you have to open one image at a time and then close it, but there are zip file downloads so you can take whole sets in one go. And the galleries also come with interactive options, as do the videos: you can rate them, share them, add comments and add them to your favourites area. Up in the main menu you will see a Community area: this brought me lots of icons and small names. (I didn't actually see any avatars or real photos.) I was able to see if these folk had uploaded any videos though, but those I looked at all had 0 videos. The point being that it looks like the site is set up for some swapping and sharing, but not many people actually do that. That's a shame as the site would be much bigger and more fun if people did.
Back at the main pages though you are able to make use of a category page and see the videos with the most comments and there are other ways of sorting through your content. You should then be able to click into the main, network, protected area with your username and passwords and start exploring all the extras and bonuses.
I was expecting a better set-up and service from this award winning network, but the pages at Homegrown Anal Sex were slow to load and very basic in design. There was a reasonable amount of content but not as much as I was expecting, and it was on the amateur, home-shot anal themes, with other kinds of hardcore going on as well. Luckily you have access to the full set of sites and the network, and it is here that you get great value for money and loads of extra amateur porn to play with.
