Comments on: Vudu's HDX upgrade delivers the best downloadable video quality to date

The latest Vudu firmware upgrade delivers the best video quality we've ever seen on a set-top box.

[scaught78]

Tempting, but with Comcast's download caps, I think I will stick with my Blu Ray player.

[jaydyess]

Scaught78, that was going to be my comment...I have Comcast as well, and their transfer rate limits seem to make devices like this impractical. Does anyone know how much bandwidth one of these movies takes up to transfer?

(Dear Lord, please send FIOS our way...)

[dave brunner]

Please keep in mind that (1) download is crapy compared to instant streaming over the public internet. (2) That just because video is 1080p does not mean it's Blu-Ray. (3) Vudu is a 1 trick pony (4) Vudu uses names that are similar to other brands (5) I would never do pay per view when I could do subscription. (6) John Falcone does not know the IPTV industry well enough if this is the best quality he's seen in the entire industry. (7) P2P will kill our bandwidth cap's (8) Vudu requires harddrives and the harddrives are to small to hold all the movies I would want. (9) Vudu has no live tv, music, radio, photo, etc... as a service. (10) Does not have the wide range of content that I want, hence it's not on demand instantly either.

David Brunner

[OscarWeb]

Why is downloading crappy compared to instant streaming? Unless your connection can sustain an average of 9Mbps, then this is not going to happen with HDX. No one said this was Blu-Ray quality, but it's the closest that the average consumer can probably get to over the Internet. Whether or not Vudu is a 1-trick pony remains to be seen. Considering how more and more people are moving to instant or near-instant viewing, when you want, where you want, using the Internet for movies and other content, it also remains to be seen whether or not Blu-Ray itself is a 1-trick pony. Players should be far less than $400 by now, yet the majority are not. This will not change with the new generation of Profile 2.0 players that are just appearing on the scene, and discs are still expensive as well, prerecorded or not. What names does Vudu use that are similar to other brands? David Pogue also wrote an article about the same thing last week and he was also thoroughly impressed with the quality, with a bit more technical details on the new "format". If you're so against downloading and are so pro-streaming, why do you even care how large the hard drive is?

[extirpator]

@ OscarWeb, First off I think his point about downloading vs instant streaming is about that fact this requires 7 hours of download time vs lower quality instant streaming offered by cable on demand systems. I'm sorry, but when the Wife says, "lets watch a movie," she doesn't mean in 7 hours. I would rather spend 15 minutes driving to my local video store and picking up a blu-ray disk than spend 7 hours of precious Comcast bandwidth downloading a one time watch. At best with the current cap one can expect to get around 8 movies per month with this system.

Secondly Blu-ray players are below $400, in fact there are blu-ray players now for $200. The problem is most people want higher end features on the basic budget players, and that's going to take another year or two to happen; however, at the same time the current $200 budget players should drop in price to around the $100 mark at which point some people will say things like, "Players should be far less than $200 by now..."

[BenFlavoredCandy]

For the vast majority of people out there, downloading HD movies with Vudu will not touch a 250gb bandwidth limit. Check out an article from cnet a few weeks back where Peter Glaskowsky runs the numbers. He calculates about 100 hours of HD content per month: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10031116-23.html?tag=mncol;txt

[dave brunner]

P2P uses excessive amounts of bandwidth. The Vudu box is a mini server so it's uploading and downloading 24 hours per day. That's what put a real drain on your bandwidth bil!!!

David Brunner