Do you Vudu?
27 December 2007Through a mailing list at work I found out about a new technology called Vudu. It’s a box that allows you to rent or buy movies from your home and watch them immediately. It’s similar to PayPerView, except that the selection is advertised as having 5,000 movies available and you’re not tied to a schedule. Once you “rent” a movie you can start it any time in the next 30 days. The only caveat is that the rental will expire 24 hours from the time you start watching it. Optionally, you can “buy” a movie and it is stored on the hard drive in the Vudo box. The service may also sound familiar to those of you with OnDemand from your cable or satellite provider. We’ve had DirecTV for about 6 years, and they are only just now rolling out OnDemand service. OnDemand allows you to rent movies or watch reruns of TV shows directly from your service provider. It’s particularly useful if you’ve missed an episode of your favorite show.
90% of the movies we watch are routed through Netflix. We’ll watch our own DVD’s or go to the movies, but we rarely watch PayPerView. So why the Vudu box? Because it was new technology at the right price. In an effort to get users on-board Vudu has an “evangelist” program where, if you qualify by means of a survey, they will sell you the Vudu box for $99 (regularly priced @ 399) and add $99 of video “credit” to your account on activation of service. There are no monthly service bills - you pay the cost to rent movies or you don’t. It’s all up to the user.
First impressions were good. The setup required a broadband connection, power, and a connection to the TV (we chose HDMI). Pretty simple. Once it was hooked up we answered a few questions in a setup screen, and then activated the box online. Ready to go! When you fire up the box you’re able to browse movies by all the criteria you’d expect to see and then some: movie rating (PG, R, etc.), critic star rating, director, genre, etc. When you find a movie you’re interested in you can either rent/buy it right there or add it to your “Wish List.” Watching a movie is immediate, as the data is delivered via your broadband connection in a peer-to-peer type of environment (ala Napster or Limewire). The movie downloads as you watch it. With a fast enough connection, the download will be faster then the speed of the movie (meaning you can fast forward if desired).
There are 2 downsides so far. One is that not all movies can be rented. Some can only be bought for prices at or near the cost of buying the DVD. I’m not going to buy a movie that can only be stored/played from that hard drive. There is no function to transfer it off to DVD media. We added a few ‘buy only’ movies to our Wish List with the hope that they’d be available later for rental.
The other problem is that out of 5,000 movies there is a lot of crap, and not enough new releases. I’m giving them a bit of a break on that one because the company just went public within the last month or so, and I know it takes time to get movie studios on board. Heck, when I joined Netflix in March of 2000 they only had a few thousands movies too - and now they’re up to something like 70,000 titles. If the technology catches on, the movies will catch up. If not, we’ve got $99 in credit for a $99 piece of hardware. It’s still a win-win.
I’m not sure how often we’ll use the Vudu box, but it does fill an occasional need to watch a movie without having to wait for one in the mail, or drive down the street. At a street price of $399 I couldn’t recommend it - especially with the lack of new releases, but with any luck the box will be a hit and they’ll find a price point which makes it more attractive to those who weren’t lucky enough to get it for free.
on February 1st, 2008 at 10:55 pm
When I heard about this technology a month or two ago I thought it was pretty neat. Especially for buying movies. I have lugged around enough boxes of videos and DVD’s in the last few moves. I love the idea of just downloading a file rather than trying to find shelf space. I will wait for the price to come down though. I have On Demand with Comcast. Their prices are going up but it is still much cheaper than late fees at Blockbuster.
on February 6th, 2008 at 10:50 am
The price on the box came down to $295… which is a little closer to being reasonable. I think $199 is probably the sweet spot.
Overall, I’ve been happy with it. I’ve had some problems with it maxing out my network bandwidth, and their support staff has gone above and beyond in trying to diagnose the problem.