Earlier in the week I was offered a Vudu box to test drive and so far my family and I have watched two movies on it. The company was nice enough to provide some free credits so we have watched a couple of recently released movies.
I want to talk a little bit about the experience so far. The Vudu box and setup was straight forward and took about 5 minutes to get it plugged in and up and running. But I think the thing that shocked me the most was that the Vudu box required a hard wired lan connection.
I am not sure how many people have Lan connections close to their TV but we sure don’t here. I was pretty blown away that the device did not have a Wifi card in it. I was lucky though that I had a couple of the those ethernet connection devices that work through a power line.
I am not sure what the speed is of those power line ethernet devices are but it has to be equivalent of a Wifi connection. So as far as the setup goes this is the only real negative thing I have to say about the box.
The New Movie selection offered by Vudu was similar to what is available on my pay per view selections offered by my local cable company. But the number of older movies was pretty impressive with movies that have been released a long time ago available as well. Release dates for new movies were within a day or two of what is available on pay per view.
The cost of renting movies looked to be a little cheaper the two we rented were $3.95 each. On the same menu we were given the ability to buy a movie to own and I did see that the prices varied from title to title. The highest price for owning the Movie was $19.95
I assume that if I buy a movie Vudu will down load and make the movie available to me via the internal hard drive. The Vudu website indicates that the two USB ports on the device will allow for expanded storage later.
The two movies we have watched have been standard definition and thus far were as good as renting them via my cable provider. Their was no degradation in video quality and the movies started instantly. I have to say that out Vudu experience thus far has been positive.
I will talk more about the HD capability and experience with Renting a HD movie and also the user interface in a later post. Check out Vudu.com for more details on this product.
Disclaimer: I was provided the Vudu box for free, and have been provided limited credits to watch movies on the service. No promise was made or implied for a positive review.