Vudu movie box: Veddy, veddy expensive
— -- Pop quiz: Which is larger, the number of movie genres or the number of ways those movies are delivered to your living room? For all your dramas, comedies, horror flicks and so forth, there's TiVo, Blockbuster, Netflix, cable and satellite TV, pay-per-view, video on demand, Apple TV, PC downloads and more.
Thursday brings the launch of yet another vehicle for distributing movies to home cinema. It's called Vudu from a Santa Clara, Calif., start-up of the same name.
Vudu promises instant access to about 5,000 movies from all the major studios, plus 20 independent studios and distributors. Films arrive via a small, 4-pound, set-top box; it has a 250-gigabyte hard drive capable of storing about 100 hours of standard-definition movies. Eventually, you'll be able to increase storage by connecting a USB hard drive. Vudu's box must be connected by Ethernet cable to a fast (2 Mbps minimum) broadband Internet connection.
Now the rub: Before you can "rent" movies (99 cents to $3.99 a pop) or buy them ($4.99 to $19.99 each), you must fork over $399 for the hardware. That's a lot to pay for the convenience. Even with no subscription fees, I'm having a difficult time coming to grips with Vudu's pricing.
A similar pricing scheme was a chief reason I didn't recommend a somewhat similar on-demand service called MovieBeam, reviewed here a year-and-a-half ago. It then cost $200 for a box to rent flicks, albeit for a far slimmer selection of movies.
Vudu worked well, following a trying start. My test box was loaded with about 4,000 movies, but not all of the absolute latest batch of films. The company says it will have 17 of the top 20 DVD rentals as of Thursday's launch. Thus, the newest movie I watched was Night at the Museum. I also took in oldies such as Breakfast at Tiffany's and family flicks such as Charlotte's Web
Moreover, while Vudu's hardware is capable of supporting high-definition content, no licensed HD fare is available yet. Here's a closer look:
•Start-up blues. Setting up Vudu turned into a B-movie nightmare. I connected the box to my Sony HDTV using a single HDMI cable often used these days to connect high-def sets to other components. A Vudu logo appeared on the TV screen, but then the screen went dark. The logo reappeared, then went dark again — a scenario that continued. I couldn't complete the setup. After a round of troubleshooting, the company concluded the hard drive was corrupted.
