January 2008

Continuing my review of the Vudu movie service, let’s look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of Vudu.

Vudu remote control. The Vudu box’s remote control has got to be one of the simplest and easiest to use of high tech gadgets. Instead of loading up on buttons, tiny LCD displays, and more complications, Vudu went the simplistic route. Like an Apple remote control, the Vudu features a minimal set of buttons in a great form factor. The curvy black remote sits nicely in your hand and the scroll wheel for up and down and left to right movements has got to be a breakthrough. Don’t know why more remotes don’t feature a clickable scroll wheel.

Bundled goodies. Vudu is including a few goodies to entice users. To introduce HD content to users, Vudu is including The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy in HD (a value of $50), and you can complete the triology by buying The Bourne Supremacy in HD for $25. To kick start your Vudu experience, customers also receive $50 in credit when buying a Vudu box until the end of January 2008.

Cost of rentals and purchases. The price structure of renting and buying movies on Vudu is reasonable. Not necessarily the cheapest prices, but well within reason. Here’s a simple price comparison for my purchase of the movie Superbad.

• Vudu $19.99
• DVD from Best Buy $19.99
• DVD from Amazon.com $16.99
• Unbox $14.99
• iTunes Store N/A

You don’t get the extras available on DVDs but don’t have to wait for the disc to arrive in the mail or drive to a store. The Unbox cost is cheap, but unless you have a Tivo, you’ll have to watch the movie on your computer.

HD available. Movies on HD are being introduced to Vudu starting with the Bourne series. But Vudu recently upgraded its hardware lineup to include the Vudu XL that can better handle HD content.

Movies available. Okay, not necessarily bad, but available content on Vudu could be better. While the service touts over 5000 videos available, scanning the movie count on my Vudu box usually shows 4700-4800 flicks available. Still decent and recently, Vudu has started to include television shows into its lineup.

No portable content. All movies in Vudu stay with Vudu. Unfortunately, subscribers cannot move Vudu content to other devices such as computers or iPods. You have to watch Vudu videos on the Vudu box.

No other content. Vudu is a one trick pony, only able to show movies from the Vudu service. As of yet, you cannot add your own content to the Vudu box for display. So while you may have movies, videos, pictures, and other content on your computer, you cannot display them on the Vudu box. Kind of a bummer especially when family members want to relive Christmas hijinks.

Constant network activity. My broadband provider, Oceanic Cable Road Runner, hasn’t said anything about my bandwidth usage since my Vudu box went online, but there must be a significant increase. All the lights on my cable modem are more or less solid green all the time, day and night. I don’t know how much data is being transferred but the activity never stops.

Initial cost. The single most ugliest aspect of Vudu is the starting price of $400 for the box. While the mentioned goodies help defray the cost, it’s still steep. Fortunately, I received my test unit completely free for evaluation purposes, but if it weren’t free, I wouldn’t have purchased a Vudu on my own. And the Vudu XL I mentioned previously? That super capacity Vudu box costs $999.

No blue LED? Talking aesthetics, the black Vudu box with blue highlights is visually stunning. But why then ruin the front of the Vudu box with green and orange LED lights? Why not go with matching blue LEDs?

Previous Vudu posts:

• Review: Vudu Movie Service (Part 1)
• Review: Vudu Movie Service (Part 2)
• Review: Vudu Movie Service (Part 3: Convenience)

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