Open Letter To Vudu Management

[MaxH]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

I don't know any more about what they're going to do than anyone else here, but in my mind I always pictured it being BYOHDD, with the VUDU formatting the drive for you after you prompt it to. But either the file system or at least the files themselves will be in the locked, proprietary format to comply with the studios' restrictions.

[bqmeister]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

I'm not privy to any details on this matter, so I can offer an hypothesis.

Last month we saw the same day HD release of Bourne Ultimatum. Perhaps this was a "test" by at least one studio to prove that the Vudu company could keep the content away from the consumer until the approved date/time. With any luck, Vudu passed the test and the same day release negotiations have moved on to the next phase.

Again, I have no knowledge of this matter. I do know that Vudu has demonstrated the ability for same day release. Heck, later this month they will be proving the ability to release exclusive Vudu Only HD content. The way I sees it, things are headed in the right direction.

I missed that. Bourne Ultimatum is available for rental?

[Nded]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

I missed that. Bourne Ultimatum is available for rental?

I'm not going be near my Vudu for about 30 hours, so I haven't noticed if there is anything listed on the Vudu for a rental date. Besides, I purchased it to make my Bourne collection complete! Have you checked your Vudu recently to see if there is a rental date coming soon? That's the most reliable source of information on rental option dates at this time.

[redwein]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

FYI, as far as I know, off the shelf USB drives are on the roadmap - the drives will have to be formatted/encrypted by the Vudu, and deditcated to such.

The dedicated part is the kicker. It means you couldn't share the 3TB external drive with the Vudu and other uses. Once it is dedicated, whether you have to buy one particular model or another isn't an issue.

[NA9D]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

Isn't VUDU supposed to be enabling the capability to add an external USB drive soon? That could allow them to put out a box with a small hard drive, say 80GB and then the customer could connect their own USB drive. I have Terabytes of drives sitting around that I could stick into an enclosure for use with their box. I want to get the VUDU but my price point is $200 with some movie credits. And I guess with my 30/5 FIOS connection I should have some quick downloads.

The hard drive is not the reason for the cost. 80 Gig hard drives are actually getting hard to find. One reason for wanting a larger size drive is that rented movies stay on your drive and are shared with others.

In terms of your 30/5 connection and quick downloads - Vudu HD uses 4 Mb/sec - that's it. The box doesn't download any faster than it needs to for you to get the movie.

[NA9D]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

I don't know any more about what they're going to do than anyone else here, but in my mind I always pictured it being BYOHDD, with the VUDU formatting the drive for you after you prompt it to. But either the file system or at least the files themselves will be in the locked, proprietary format to comply with the studios' restrictions.

The drive is BYOD. But it will be formatted by the Vudu and won't be usable by anything else.

[aaronwt]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

The hard drive is not the reason for the cost. 80 Gig hard drives are actually getting hard to find. One reason for wanting a larger size drive is that rented movies stay on your drive and are shared with others.

In terms of your 30/5 connection and quick downloads - Vudu HD uses 4 Mb/sec - that's it. The box doesn't download any faster than it needs to for you to get the movie.

Since it uses peer to peer for downloading, what is the fastest that it will upload when it pulls files off the Vudu box to send to someone elses box?

[NA9D]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

Since it uses peer to peer for downloading, what is the fastest that it will upload when it pulls files off the Vudu box to send to someone elses box?

about 200 to 300 kbps.

[rstone]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

The drive is BYOD. But it will be formatted by the Vudu and won't be usable by anything else.

I was wondering though... lets say you get a 1TB external drive and hook it up to VUDU, you buy a ton of movies in both SD and HD and somehow you end up filling up your 1TB drive... what then?

Do you hook up a 2nd drive on a USB hub or hope that they come out with a 2TB drive before you run out of space?

Also, do you know if the 1TB VUDU XL will offer the ability to add an external 1TB usb drive to give it a total of 2TB space?

Another thing that has been on my mind lately is, if you have the current VUDU box, and lets say you fill up that 250gig harddrive with HD movies, which isnt hard to imagen, then what happens if you upgrade the box to the VUDU XL? how do the movies transfer over?

or for that fact what happens if you decide to sell your box and get a new box with upgraded features on it?

Lastly, why did they decide to use USB ports instead of eSATA ports... USB is extremely slow compared to eSATA, and when your talking about huge files, you would think eSATA is the more logical choice.

[NA9D]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

Well, let's think about things.

1.) There are TWO USB ports on the Vudu. So one could conceivably hook up 2 USB drives.
2.) There is also no reason why you couldn't hook up a USB hub.
3.) The Vudu XL will have the same external drive support.
4.) What happens during a box upgrade is something I'm trying to get official word from marketing on. I know that if your box dies, there will be a process to pre-load a replacement box with your purchased content. I have not seen the policy for an upload path, but I have made it very clear to people at the VP level of Vudu that this needs to be something they are able to put in place.
5.) In terms of USB vs. eSata - why? The box only streams at 4 Mb/sec and therefore, the data requirements are relatively low. USB 2.0 can easily handle something up to around 400 Mb/sec albeit with overhead. So it's not something that's really that much of an issue IMHO.

[Nded]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

Stretch your imagination a little on this. I can't think of a reason why one wouldn't be able to have multiple USB drives for expansion. Given a reasonable level of end user movie storage control, you'd be able to put your shows on different drive - one for the kiddies, one for mom, one for dad, etc... Virtually unlimited expansion with low cost off the shelf USB drives. Then again, for folks that are primarily "renters" this isn't even an issue with the Vudu Classic, much less the Vudu XL.

[rstone]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

Stretch your imagination a little on this. I can't think of a reason why one wouldn't be able to have multiple USB drives for expansion. Given a reasonable level of end user movie storage control, you'd be able to put your shows on different drive - one for the kiddies, one for mom, one for dad, etc... Virtually unlimited expansion with low cost off the shelf USB drives. Then again, for folks that are primarily "renters" this isn't even an issue with the Vudu Classic, much less the Vudu XL.

At some point you dont want 10 drives stacked on one another, and probably would be better to just upgrade. Which in itself presents another problem. What happens if all your movies are on the 1TB or on two 1TB drives and you decide you want all your movies on that brand new 2TB drive that just came on the market, instead of 2 individual USB drives. As you can see, this starts to become a problem at some point. Afterall, how do you get the data off the two individual drives to put on the upgraded 2TB drive.

[redwein]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

This is exactly why I don't see the advantage to owning and storing your own video collection in the age of VOD. For the most part, it is much more cost effective to pay a rental fee for every viewing except for a relatively small number of movies that you absolutely know you will watch over and over.

[rstone]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

This is exactly why I don't see the advantage to owning and storing your own video collection in the age of VOD. For the most part, it is much more cost effective to pay a rental fee for every viewing except for a relatively small number of movies that you absolutely know you will watch over and over.

Sure when you rent a movie, you'll be able to see the movie once for the $3.00+ fee. If the movie is terrible and not worth anyone's time to watch, you made a wise decision by previewing it first before you owned it, and saved yourself a good $11-$17. If the movie was great, you loved it and will want to watch it again in the future, you'll then be paying $3.00+ you wouldn't have paid otherwise if you had just gone out and purchased the movie.

And if you happen to wait for the price to drop, but yet you rented it more than a few times, you might have been better off buying it.

So where does that leave us? Well more than likely you will have to view a movie about 3 times before it pays for it-self, and most of us will watch the movies in our collection at least that many times. If you can get movies at discounted prices, by waiting, it will make even more sense to go out and buy movies.

If you're not sure you want to buy because you don't know if the movie will be any good, by all means...go ahead and rent if first. However, if you decide after renting it that you like it, then decide to buy it, you will pay extra for that convenience.

Personally, I buy more than I rent, but that is because I buy movies I KNOW I like, and will watch again and again.

[redwein]

Re: Open Letter To Vudu Management

Sure when you rent a movie, you'll be able to see the movie once for the $3.00+ fee. If the movie is terrible and not worth anyone's time to watch, you made a wise decision by previewing it first before you owned it, and saved yourself a good $11-$17. If the movie was great, you loved it and will want to watch it again in the future, you'll then be paying $3.00+ you wouldn't have paid otherwise if you had just gone out and purchased the movie.

And if you happen to wait for the price to drop, but yet you rented it more than a few times, you might have been better off buying it.

So where does that leave us? Well more than likely you will have to view a movie about 3 times before it pays for it-self, and most of us will watch the movies in our collection at least that many times. If you can get movies at discounted prices, by waiting, it will make even more sense to go out and buy movies.

If you're not sure you want to buy because you don't know if the movie will be any good, by all means...go ahead and rent if first. However, if you decide after renting it that you like it, then decide to buy it, you will pay extra for that convenience.

Personally, I buy more than I rent, but that is because I buy movies I KNOW I like, and will watch again and again.

I think that depends on how big of a collection you have. Also, when you factor in the "cost" of owning, you have to add the cost of any HD or other hardware you would have to buy. With my current collection of ~700 movies, it became unusable until I spent many thousands of dollars in hardware to make my own VOD solution. So I would have to watch the movies more than 3 times to break even. Even so, I would bet that we, on average, will watch those movies less than that. For some movies it will be much more, but for others it will be much less.

If you only plan to have a relatively small number of movies, it isn't a big deal. But this discussion has had people discussing multi-terabyte storage solutions which aren't inexpensive. That's what I was questioning. Even if you don't plan to rip them onto hard drives, if you continue buying movies, it can become very difficult to organize and manage after a while and take up a lot of space to boot.