First of all, not everyone does have a subscription to Netflix. I for one still used to visit Blockbuster. I hate the idea of a monthly fee to rent movies. I don’t watch that many so why should I pay $10 or $15 a month for movies that I don’t watch? Better to rent one at a time. The Vudu rental fees are on par with those of cable PayPerView or Blockbuster rental offerings. Please, when people spend $8.00 to go see a movie in a theatre, don’t tell me it’s expensive to pay $1.99 or even $2.99 for a rental. That’s just product bashing.

Second, in terms of content, the box has been out simply for about a week now. The content will definitely grow and you didn’t even mention the truly amazing thing about this box – it supports up to 1080p in HD! Yes, HD content will most certainly be offered and sooner rather than later. The quality even of SD video on the box is amazing as well. 5000 movies is a starting point and more titles are added weekly. But the whole fault of certain titles not being available is not that of Vudu’s. Speak to the movie studios who basically are wary of any new technology out there. They wanted to ban VCRs and rentals at one point because it would kill the movie theatre business. They were wrong. Need I say more? It takes time to get these “old world and old school” companies to think differently and employ new business models. Downloads are here to stay plain and simple and the best way to beat piracy is to provide a simple and easy download service that allows people the content they want legally. Vudu is a giant first step in this regard.

I am sorry you didn’t get to experience Vudu on a higher speed network. The difference between waiting and not waiting is tremendous. And there’s a lot of technical reasons behind the fluctuating download times I won’t go into here but 45 minutes is about right for what you had to wait. More and more people though are getting higher and higher speed connections. In a couple of years, 2 Mb/sec is going to seem slow. Technology moves forward at amazing pace. To use the speed as a negative is specious at best.

In terms of the P2P network, look at all the people using bit torrent out there to illegally share content. They allow their bandwidth to be used by others? Vudu does the same thing but in a legal way. If you consider the server load that would be required to serve a single hot new movie to 50,000 viewers the day it is released, the infrastructure for that is huge. It is far more efficient to employ a distributed model as Vudu has done thereby not putting too much emphasis on any one “link in the chain.” There’s multiple, redundant locations for content and no one location is too overburdened at any one time. It completely makes sense.

Is the box expensive? Yes. But last I checked BluRay players were selling for what, $600 and there’s probably more content available on Vudu than on BluRay.

The box is way, way better than what you state. Give it a second and third chance. You’ll fall in love with it.

http://hd.appletvsource.com

Look at some of these podcasts and you will understand why you bought that big LCD TV that is hanging in your wall in the first place.