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High-Speed Video Store in the Living Room
The $400 Vudu box offers access to 5,000 downloadable movies that viewers can rent or buy.
By DAVID POGUE
If you had to make a master list of all the world’s problems, “limited access to movies” probably wouldn’t appear until Page 273,996.
Truth is, life is teeming with opportunities to see movies: movie theaters, video stores, DVD-by-mail services, TV movie channels, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox 360, iTunes, Internet downloads, hotel rooms, airplanes and so on.
But according to the team at Vudu, all of those outlets are flawed.
Video stores: you have to drive back and forth, and the movie you want might be out of stock. Netflix and Blockbuster by mail: you have to wait a day or two for each movie to arrive. Pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox, iTunes and hotel rooms: puny movie selections. Internet downloads: they arrive on your computer, not your TV.
Vudu’s new $400 movie box, to be available at month’s end, has none of those problems. It’s a little black box (about 7 by 9 by 2 inches) that connects to your TV and to the Internet through a high-speed link — and it comes darned close to putting a video store in your house. Its built-in hard drive permits your choice of 5,000 movies to begin playing instantaneously. There’s no computer involved, no waiting and no monthly fee.
There are four really great things about the Vudu box. First, the picture quality is terrific — like a DVD. If you have an HDTV, the box even “upconverts” the picture into pseudo-high definition. Moreover, Vudu will offer movies in true high definition once it finishes negotiating with the movie studios. (Tech note: The Vudu box will play high-def movies through its HDMI connector only — not its component, S-video or composite jacks.)
Second, the remote rocks. It has only four buttons, plus a clickable scroll wheel like the one on a computer mouse. The wheel is a breakthrough; it lets you zoom through lists of movies and categories. During playback, the wheel is a rewind/fast-forward shuttle control. It lets you jump almost instantly to any spot in the movie; it does not, however, actually “seek” — that is, speed up playback while you’re scanning for a certain scene.
The remote is not illuminated, but it doesn’t have to be; if you cannot memorize the four buttons in five minutes, you have bigger problems.
Third, you pay by the movie, not by the month. When life gets busy, you don’t pay anything. You can either rent a movie (usually $2 to $4) — you have 24 hours to finish watching it — or you can buy it ($15 to $20), meaning that it stays on your Vudu hard drive forever.
The 250-gigabyte drive holds 100 full-length movies. In about six months, Vudu plans to activate the box’s U.S.B. jack, so you can attach another hard drive to hold more movies.
Finally, Vudu movies begin playing instantly. There’s nothing to it. Find a movie, either by typing part of its name or by browsing the New Releases, Genres, Staff Favorites or Most Popular lists. Click past the price/confirmation screen. Start watching.
How can one hard drive hold 5,000 movies? This is the best part: it doesn’t. It actually holds only the first 30 seconds of each movie — typically the movie studio logos. While you watch that, the rest of the movie quietly begins to download; the handoff from the starter stub to the downloaded portion is undetectable.
This impressive engineering feat also explains two other quirks of the Vudu box. First, you cannot fast-forward into a movie that just started. Second, you cannot use the Vudu box without a fast Internet connection — preferably a wired one. Cable modems are great, but basic D.S.L. and dial-up connections are not fast enough. Higher-tier D.S.L. plans might have the required speed; a speed-testing button appears at Vudu.com.
(Here’s another clever backstage tech trick: the Vudu boxes communicate with one another, using a peer-to-peer system. When you start watching, say, “The Last Mimzy,” your box receives chunks of that movie from the Vudu boxes of other people who have already downloaded it. None of this affects you one bit — it’s all invisible to you — but it’s a pretty clever way for Vudu, the company, to save money, since it does not have to pay for its own servers to pump out those gazillions of gigabytes.)
The box itself runs cool, it is totally silent, and its remote uses radio waves rather than infrared. That way, you can put the box in a closet; it does not require line-of-sight with the remote. That’s lucky, because the box’s oddball size and shape mean it does not stack well with standard DVD players, VCRs and so on.
The catalog of movies is updated with 10 or 20 new titles each week, and an equivalent number is retired. Since you always have 5,000 to choose from — Vudu plans to expand the list to 10,000 — the odds are excellent that when you’re in a movie mood, you will find something you like. The movies come from every major Hollywood studio, plus a healthy number of independents.
But if you look for one particular movie, you might sometimes be disappointed.
One reason: plenty of the movies are pure filler. They range from no-name horror cheapies (“San Franpsycho” or “Night Fangs,” anyone?) to superniche flicks like “The History of Texas Longhorns Football” and “Yoga for Depression and Gastro-Intestinal Disorders.”
Another reason: Vudu’s catalog is a victim of what Hollywood calls distribution windows. After a movie leaves theaters, it becomes available through other channels in a strict order: (1) hotels and airlines; (2) DVD; (3) pay-per-view television; (4) movie channels like HBO and Starz; (5) TV and everywhere else.
Vudu, as it turns out, gets movies during Phases 2, 3 and 5. Weirdly, that means that a movie might appear on your box, disappear during the HBO window and reappear a year later.
Maybe that’s why the Vudu box, at introduction, has 41 out of 50 movies on Formovies.com’s current Top Rentals list (it has “300” and “Blades of Glory”), but only 10 out of the 50 on Moviefone’s “Best of 2006” list (it is missing “Dreamgirls,” “The Departed” and so on).
Vudu’s dependence on the notoriously conservative, profit-driven movie studios also explains many of its frustrating inconsistencies. Some Vudu movies are available for purchase or rent; others, only for purchase. Some movies have previews (movie trailers); others do not. The list includes hundreds of movies from some studios (Paramount, Sony, Warner) and only a handful from others (Disney).
While we’re nit-picking, it’s worth noting that Vudu offers no DVD extras — deleted scenes, subtitles and so on. Be prepared, too, for a less obvious loss: serendipity. With other movie sources, the limited selection or the wait for the mail carrier can provide a moment of happy surprise when you find something good or open the mailing envelope. Vudu is more like shooting fish in a barrel.
If Vudu sounds familiar, by the way, that might be because of its similarity to MovieBeam, which has been around for a couple of years. MovieBeam’s hard drive contains only 100 movies at a time, but it costs only $150 and does not require an Internet connection (its movies are beamed through the air).
Vudu is clearly a more high-end offering, which may be why it will be initially sold only through www.vudu.com, Amazon.com and home-theater retail stores.
Vudu is a clear win if you, like 30 million other Americans, make several trips to the video store each month. It’s also great if you like pay-per-view but wish you had a better selection. Vudu may not be a Netflix killer, though, unless you think Vudu’s instant access is more important than Netflix’s much larger selection (more than 70,000 movies).
If you do do Vudu, with the time you would have spent driving to the video store or waiting for the mailman, you can do other things — like solving the world’s more pressing problems.
