Someone looking for information on Amazon's new Fire TV on the Web might be in for a bit of a shock. The video streaming and gaming set-top box shares a name with a porn site.
The media and retail giant on Wednesday announced its Fire TV, an attempt by the company to grab a spot in the living room to promote its own content services.
Consumers, however, who enter firetv.com (NSFW) into their browsers (rather than searching for information about the product on Amazon's home page) will get something very different. Rather than offering information about Fire TV, the site is the home of a video-on-demand pornography service.
The porn site, which is technically named Fyre TV, but apparently bought the firetv.com domain expecting people to misspell its name, has been around since 2008. Subscribers are able to stream explicit XXX content directly to their TVs via Roku and other third-party set-top boxes.
It's an embarrassing situation for Amazon, though hardly a fatal one. The Amazon.com domain is one of the Web's most widely trafficked sites and Fyre TV is not especially well-known outside of the porn world.
The site has been flying under the radar, even in adult entertainment industry terms, for the past several years. Fyre TV has not updated its Twitter feed since last August and it has not made any corporate announcements for years, though it does seem to be updating its catalog with recent releases.
Amazon.com officials could not be immediately reached for comment.