Vudu Set-Top Box Weds Legal P2P and HD Movies

prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running a story on a Silicon Valley company that is planning to revolutionize the movie business. It's no secret that the movie-going experience has been deteriorating, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, run by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. That could enables the movie studios to make movies securely available to viewers on the day of release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others: 'DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.'"

So....

[Kjella]

Their box is planning to upload HDTV vids through average people's internet connection? Most people have enough downloading, thank you. Something tells me QoS routers will get very popular if this catches on. P2P is a great way to "chip in" your bandwidth without actually setting up a central system. If you've set up a central system already, bandwidth is much cheaper and more available centrally than it is for me. With my DSL line I'm basicly capped at whatever they are able to deliver, and I hardly think I'm alone in that. The marginal price for me to have another Mbit of upload capacity is ca. infinite, or at least some ungodly expensive business connection. Easynews offers 20GB download for $10, which is about the same infrastructure Vudu would need to have. I'd easily rather pay 10$ to Vudu than upload 20GB over my connection.

Re:Bad copy?

[romland]

Hmm. Referring to your sarcasm here, I don't know what you mean when you say "hacked". In Microsoft's case I dare say it's been successful. Sure, you can run pirated games on it, but it's far from a "hack once, run everywhere" trick. And it does seem like Microsoft could care less about the DVD-drive hack. What they *do* care about is the integrity of the box, they want it to remain closed and I think they have been damn successful in doing that.

Sure, there was a hole which enabled people to run unsigned code for a short period of time there, but they fixed that very smoothly by blowing an efuse on the CPU and tadaa problem fixed. And with fixed I mean: Sure, you can keep your 360 at that kernel, but you WILL be forced to upgrade sooner or later if you want to use the bloody thing for anything other than running unsigned code.

So, it really *does* look like Microsoft is close to closing down that box. But say, if there was DRM that could be cracked in it there might be a whole new heap of hackers that would put their effort into getting into the box and that might yield more results than what we've seen so far.

Not sure if it really should be sarcasm in Microsoft's case. As for the state of Nintendo's and Sony's current-gen boxes, I don't know.

"their entire backlog of movies"? Yeah Right...

[jonwil]

Just as an example of some items I am unable to buy on DVD here in australia but would like to own:
Snow White (the pre-WW2 Disney classic)
The Real Ghostbusters (the 80s cartoon)
Tales Of The Gun (History Channel documentary series)
Other History Channel documentaries
Space Above And Beyond
Hey Dad (classic Aussie sitcom)

Even if you account for the fact that some of them (like some of the History Channel stuff) may in fact be available if you are willing to import from America, there are still plenty of movies and TV episodes that you just plain can't get legally on DVD or from ANY download service anywhere in the world.

Re:Bad copy?

[Darkinspiration]

it's only a matter of time. The original xbox took quite a bit of time to be hacked to.

Re:Costs for the user?

[Simonetta]

A better idea would be to put a high speed downloading machine into the local video rental store. The store could download the top ten Hollywood movies in high res (or get a shipment of disks). Then the home movie viewer/renter could bring a hard disk or iPod-like device to the local video rental store and download the movie into the device. Then plug it into the home theater for viewing. That way they don't have to tie up their movie machine for hours downloading a single copy of the movie.
    This whole idea is lame because it completely underestimates the value of the high-speed bandwidth needed to download gigabytes of redundant movie data. I'd bet the farm that the people who thought this up have no idea that bandwidth costs money, or that it takes time to download full-length feature length films. I'd bet that they thought that the user would just call some telephone number, press a button at a movie title, and the entire film would just appear for free in 15 seconds into the user's settop box. I'll bet that the people that they pitched for the startup capital actually believe this too.
    This idea is so lame. It will go nowhere. Too bad the people who dream up this stuff don't read Slashdot.