Dear Vudu, my top 10 feature requests
Dear Vudu,
You've got a really great thing going! You're the go-to choice for most of us home movie enthusiasts, primarily because you're the only one with UVVU and DMA. That said, you could turn your really great thing into a FANTASTIC thing if you implemented the features below (roughly in order of importance). I know you're a customer-centric company, so I hope we get to see all of these soon!
Much love,
oscarsonthepond
P.S. PM me if you want to discuss!
You've got a really great thing going! You're the go-to choice for most of us home movie enthusiasts, primarily because you're the only one with UVVU and DMA. That said, you could turn your really great thing into a FANTASTIC thing if you implemented the features below (roughly in order of importance). I know you're a customer-centric company, so I hope we get to see all of these soon!
- Disney disc-to-digital - I know this is probably beyond your control, but please do whatever you can to make this happen. It, more than anything else, would be a game changer. Also just adding more movies to disc-to-digital would be great as well (there are way too many unrecognized discs, including those that work on Flixster D2D and are available on UVVU), but I'm sure you're always working on that.
- Default to view of movies I own - I buy plenty of movies from you, but most of the time when I come to Vudu it's because I want to watch a movie, not buy one. The default view when I go to Vudu.com or open any app should be My Vudu, not "Movies & TV." Think of Netflix, where you instantly see all the movies you can watch and all you have to do is click on go. At a minimum, I should have the option of setting this as the default view in settings somewhere. Even further, your whole site is just way too pushy on the sales front--for example, having a "Movies & TV" button, a "Deals" button, and a "Kids Zone" button, and then a row down having "New," "Movies," "TV," "collections," etc. buttons all of which just lead me to movie purchase pages with other options for more movie purchase pages. It's almost like you intentionally make it difficult for me to find the movies I can actually watch (i.e., the ones I own). You're going to start really being a huge success when people are coming you for all their movie WATCHING needs.....because once they're watching everything on Vudu, that's when they'll start buying everything on Vudu. Why do you think Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video are always bragging about how many hours people watched on them? Because that means people are dependent on them and moving to them for the long-term! Quit it with all the pushy sales pages and just simplify everything--there should be two main pages: a My Vudu page (that is the default) and a "Store" page where you can buy everything.
- Movie censoring on the fly - I (and MANY other users I know) would LOVE it if you provided the option for users to censor out select content by automatically muting and/or fast-forwarding it. Check out VidAngel for an example of what I mean--they let you disable language, nudity, violence, etc., and even let you select with granularity what you want to censor out. Note that this is different from the "CleanFlix" method as this way of doing it is totally legal and legit. This would result in me buying WAY more movies than I do currently as there are a ton of movies that I don't buy due to their poor content but that I would totally get if I had the option to censor it out. I have many friends who are in the same boat.
- Folders - If you want people to buy lots of movies from you, you have to let them organize those movies. Having 200-500+ movies all listed on the same page just doesn't work. Let people create folders and dump their movies into folders so that they can get organized and display them in manageable groups. I know you can display them by genre, but oftentimes those aren't going to match up with the way people really want to view them. For example, I just want to have a "Kids" folder for my kids and a "Parents" folder for us parents. When I go to "My Vudu," I just want to see the "Parents" and "Kids" folders that I created and organized the way that I organized them. Alternatively, instead of true folders you could do "tagging" similar to gmail so that you could have one movie associated with multiple tags/folders.
- Titles in plain text - It would make movies much easier to find and navigate if you included their titles in plain text above or below the images. Sometimes covers take awhile to load and sometimes they have titles that are hard to read. Plain text would be easy to search and easy to find. This would matter most on the web version but would also be helpful in the apps.
- Ungroup bundled purchases - Just because I bought a group of movies together in a bundle for a discount doesn't mean I want to see the movies grouped that way when shown in My Movies. In fact, nobody would ever want to see them grouped in My Movies--it's annoying and makes them hard to find. A lot of people go out of their way to buy bundles on a separate Vudu account linked to the same UVVU account just so that they can avoid this and have their movies show up separately on their main Vudu account. Get rid of this and show each movie separately.
- Better video experience on the web - Look at the movie watching experience on Netflix and try to copy that! When you click a movie, it instantly fills your entire browser window. You can then resize the browser window to whatever you want, and the movie resizes with it. On Vudu, for some unknown reason, the movie pops up in a box within the browser window while still showing the Vudu webpage in the background. Why would anybody ever want to watch a movie on a smaller part of their screen so that they could see the Vudu/movie webpage in the background? They wouldn't! Just make the movie fill the browser window completely.
- Allow custom title renaming - Oftentimes the official movie titles just aren't helpful for organizing purposes. For example, like many folks I have two Planet of the Apes movies but neither are listed under "P" - one is under "D" for Dawn and the other under "R" for Rise, and neither is anywhere near the other. It would be great if I could rename these titles just for my purposes so that they are easier to find. Even better, you could have a separate "Sorting Name" field or something similar that would allow me to put custom names in for purposes of alphabetizing (e.g., "Planet of the Apes 1" and "Planet of the Apes 2") while still showing their real/official titles next to the movie image (per #3 above).
- Simplify the movie pages - The page for a given movie generally looks cluttered and overly complicated. For example, when I've already purchased a movie I don't want to see a button for "from $9.99" anymore--it's confusing and makes me think I don't actually own the movie when in fact the button is apparently just for an eGift option. If you have to include an eGift button, just make it say "eGift" without the price and put it somewhere else so that it's not so confusing with the usual purchase button. Likewise, I don't need to see large/prominent "SD," "HD," and "HDX" logos when I own the HDX copy. Perhaps most importantly, the "Watch" and "Download" buttons, although at the top, are too hidden and nondescript. If someone already owns a move, then 99% of the time when they go to that movie's page it's so that they can watch the movie or download it--as such, those buttons should be WAY more prominent and really dominate the page when they're available. What would probably make the most sense is to have the buy buttons prominently displayed in the middle of the page for movies that aren't owned and then to replace those with watch and download buttons prominently displayed in the middle of the page for movies that are owned.
- Get rid of "HD" and "HDX" split - Trying to distinguish between these two really just adds confusion and no value. Whether you want to call it "HD" or "HDX," either is fine but get rid of the concept of a 720p standard--just stick to a low res and a high res.
Much love,
oscarsonthepond
P.S. PM me if you want to discuss!
Okay but seriously this is really far fetched.
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