Vudu is Becoming Fandango at Home

[jeremymc7]

"In a few weeks, we’re changing our name to Fandango at Home, making Fandango your single destination for movie tickets and home entertainment.

This change won't affect your streaming
experience, and your library will stay right
where it's always been.

Stay tuned for exciting things ahead, and thanks
for being a loyal customer."



I think we all knew this was coming at some point.

[Toddwrtr]

"Nothing will change" - haven't we heard that before?

[CommodoreKong]

Just an awful rebranded name. Almost as bad as going from Twitter to X (although this is the opposite where it goes from being a short easy name to a long name).

I hope the "exciting things ahead" are positive changes. Stuff like automatic upgrades to higher quality for stuff you already own similar to iTunes and higher video/audio bit rates. I would love to see some interface changes like a shopping cart and a filter option in Your Movies to break apart any bundles and display them movies individually. I'm not going to hold my breath that the changes will be positive though.

[NJDevilsFTW]

That's an awful name change. Fandango sucks.

[jeremymc7]

I hope the "exciting things ahead" are positive changes. Stuff like automatic upgrades to higher quality for stuff you already own similar to iTunes and higher video/audio bit rates. I would love to see some interface changes like a shopping cart and a filter option in Your Movies to break apart any bundles and display them movies individually. I'm not going to hold my breath that the changes will be positive though.

I would hope as well. But they've owned long enough that they could have make some of them already. Waiting for the name change should have nothing to do with it,

[brad4846]

Wow what a mouthful of a name. Why change a short/easy to remember name to something so clunky

[jeremymc7]

It should just be all under the Fandango main website if they want to unify with a bar at the top for Movie Tickets and one for Watch at Home (Rent / Purchase)

No reason for it to be two websites with two names.

[dontXthestreams]

"Nothing will change" - haven't we heard that before?

Payment types seemed to be changing. No more AmEx or Discover.

[jeremymc7]

Payment types seemed to be changing. No more AmEx or Discover.

Well that sucks AMEX is preferred card; though I have backups.

[brad4846]

Payment types seemed to be changing. No more AmEx or Discover.

Still showing those two as acceptable on my end (and they haven’t removed my Amex card yet), so we’ll see!

edit: nevermind found it in the faq

[ag-87]

> Stay tuned for exciting things ahead ...

To the Vudu staff:

As other people have said, positive changes are good.

That said, PLEASE do NOT change anything you are currently doing well!

For example, your UI is the best of every service I've used (please do NOT change it!). Your prices are most often the best (and thus I enjoy looking through the weekly sales). Your web sites are the best (at least in terms of account interactions, forums, and such; I don't stream off of the web site so I can't speak to that aspect of it). Being mainly purchase-based is absolutely essential ("mainly" = yes, I know there are also rentals and advertisement-based titles).

Recommended changes:
- There are a number of requests for fixes that people have made, myself included (in my case, for making subtitles more solid). Please make these the priority.
- One fix in particular is that the subtitles on some shows need to be fixed as they either lag by up to 2 seconds behind the video or in a few cases are missing entirely (such as the Doctor Who episode "Tooth and Claw" missing the subtitles entirely). The last time I watched Star Trek (original series) a number of episodes were lagging behind by 1-2 seconds. I usually hate to cite other specific services, but a good example is that the subtitles on Netflix are rock-solid synch'd with the video, so maybe consider revising the subtitles implementation to do whatever they are doing.
- When scrolling through a series, please make it so it is possible to see the entire episode description rather than just the first part of them.
- There are of course many posts from on this forum with more recommended fixes for various specific problems

In general, if something is not broken, please don't "fix" (change) it.

> I would love to see some interface changes like ...

While I agree with your specific examples (those are good ideas), we should probably be VERY careful asking for interface changes; I'd hate to see them go the way of some of the other services that have absolutely dreadful/hateful "features" in them such as the "automatic" garbage. Vudu currently has by far the best UI of any of the services I've used.

While I generally don't like getting into specific examples of bad UI design on other services, it seems that this may be the time it is important enough to go ahead with doing so.

So, one that drives me absolutely crazy is how on Netflix you click into a menu where you may want to do things like look at information on the episode/movie, etc. but it starts trying to play it BEFORE you have told it to do so. I've called Netflix and begged them to fix that overt design flaw, but they have yet to do it.

One of the worst things on many of the other services is that they put garbage on the screen blocking part of your video so they can bug you about various things while you are trying to watch the show; Vudu does NOT do this (thank you!!!). Or to put it bluntly: Those other services: "Do you want to skip this that or the next thing?". Me: "NO! OF COURSE NOT! GET THIS GARBAGE OFF OF MY SCREEN NOW!!!". Or: Those services: "Quick! Hurry up and push something or we'll do something automatic and extremely annoying like skip or minimize the credits or suddenly start playing something else!" (sometimes with a threatening count-down). Me: "NO! STOP IT!!!" Sorry, a bit of a rant, but I do NOT want Vudu to ever go that direction with their UI. The designs on those other services that fight you while you are trying to watch the show are incredibly poor and unprofessional designs (the least they could do is provide configuration options to turn that garbage off). It is not rocket science to start showing the episode/movie at the beginning and play it to the end (of the credits) with absolutely NOTHING EVER popping up on the screen. Vudu currently does this right (again, thank you!!!).

Some of the services have a terrible layout where it is nothing but long scrolling horizontal lists and takes forever to get to the title you want (whereas Vudu has the vastly superior grid layout).

These are just a few of many examples of dreadfully bad UI design on the other services I've used.

As for the name change, maybe they are right to do that. Some of my friends and relatives keep mixing up the service names "Vudu" and "Hulu"; they can't seem to keep those names straight. Plus it is very close to another word that is spelled slightly differently. A suggestion: Perhaps they should do as they do now with "Fandango" and list Vudu secondly, something along the lines of "(formerly known as Vudu)" since that name IS already in use enough that it should be kept alongside the new name.

Thank you

[filmfreak65@msn.com]

They can call it whatever they want to, but my desktop icons and jargon will forever remain VUDU.

[B2Net]

FelipeF will this forum still be active after the change? I ask since there wasn't anything in the FAQ about it.

[quackman]

FelipeF will this forum still be active after the change? I ask since there wasn't anything in the FAQ about it.

I was wondering the same. On the Fandango website it appears that Vudu will be merged INTO that one, which I'm afraid is bad news for this Forum since I don't see such a forum on that site.

[jeremymc7]

I’ve always appreciated a company run forum, even if it doesn’t get too much action.

Otherwise you’re stuck with the massive forums where you can get lost like AVS Forum or smaller ones which is still a little too broad for our specific needs like Blu-Ray forum.

Vudu forum falls in the just right fit, well mostly.