Vudu's P2P VoD box (and talking Hawking)

Watch this. It's Monday's IT Blogwatch: in which the Vudu peer-to-peer video-on-demand service decloaks. Not to mention an animation that explains how Steven Hawking experienced zero-G...

Noah Robischon has "exclusive" pictures:

Vudu, a video store in a box ... is going to engage in a battle royale with Apple TV later this summer. The service will launch with thousands of movies from seven major studios as well as indie distributors, connects directly to your TV and does not require a PC or a cable box. The company, Vudu, Inc., has been quietly engineering the technology and striking deals with content owners for the past two years (under the codename Marquee). It's run by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley ... The box is about the size of a hardcover book and delivers video streamed in MPEG-4, which is upscaled to HD.
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The chairman of the Vudu, Inc. board is Alain Rossman, the guy who made it possible for you to browse the Web on a mobile device (WAP). He got his start at Apple, then founded Phone.com (now Openwave Systems), EO Corporation, and C-Cube Microsystems among others. The founder of Vudu, Tony Miranz, comes from Tahoe Networks and AT&T Bell Labs. The COO and VP of Engineering both come from TiVo. Vudu is funded by Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Oi! Om Malik! Where did you get that hat?:

Vudu, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based start-up is getting a lot of buzz this morning, thanks to a rather extensive article in the New York Times. Their set-top box is supposed to make downloading and watching movies a pleasurable experience, and do an end run around Cable companies’ Video-on-demand offering.
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The reality is that cable companies are not sitting still and are beefing up their Video on demand offerings. Two of the largest cable providers – Comcast and Time Warner Cable are testing a video-on-demand system that would allow them to release the movies on their VoD systems the same day DVD is released, which kind of takes away any competitive advantage of Vudu.

The only thing that stands between the CableCos and mass market adoption is a sensible and userfriendly interface, that they can’t seem to develop. Having not seen the Vudu interface, I am not sure if that will be the little start-up’s edge on cable companies.

Duck! It's Joe Hunkins:

Duh ... No offense to Vudu but it’s not going to play in Peoria ... it takes a lot more than being the best of the lot in terms of providing a user with streaming movies on demand to be a successful company. Much of the company’s, mainstream media’s, and blogosphere’s breathless gushing about this product is ridiculous.
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This is another of the hundreds of silly silicon valley ideas that seem reasonable to sharp, young tech folks pulling down $10,000 per month who are not intimidated (in fact who like) stylish new gadgets and having a 10th remote control in their living room arsenal. Unfortunately for Vudu and other startups catering to this group, this group is a tiny fraction of all consumers and almost totally non-representative.

Early adopters? Sure, but it’ll be years before people demand the type of experience Vudu is offering. Vudu ... will fail as soon as the VC cash burns up.

Peter Rojas agrees:

Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before: there's yet another startup venture offering a box that you connect to your TV so you can watch movies on-demand ... long on overblown claims and hyperbole ... and short on realistic analysis of how resistant consumers have been to paying to download movies over the internet.

Vudu does have a few things going for it -- they've signed up most of the major studios and have some novel P2P stuff that helps them save on bandwidth costs and makes it possible for users to start watching a film more or less as soon as they've selected it (rather than have to wait for it to completely download) -- but that may not be enough to stand out, especially since they're planning to charge around $300 just for the box itself (which as you can guess, is laden with DRM and doesn't allow transfer to a portable device).

Besides, it's already sort of a crowded market when you think about it. Most cable users have been able to get movies on-demand for years, and it's also possible to get paid movie downloads via your Xbox 360, Apple TV, TiVo (via Amazon's Unbox service), and Akimbo, to name a few. They definitely have their work cut out for them, the landscape is littered with companies (Moviebeam, anyone?) that have tried to convince consumers that they need yet another box connected to their TV and failed miserably in the process.

But Brian "Megazone" Bikowicz droolz:

Instead of all downloads coming from one central server, VUDU units use a BitTorrent style P2P network so that other VUDU boxes that already have the content will send parts of the file to the requesting unit. This will greatly reduce download times, just as BitTorrent does. Additionally, VUDU will use a predictive system, in a way similar to TiVo Suggestions. Based on predictions of which content is most likely to be rented, VUDU will download the start of the video file in advance. This allows the user to start playback immediately, while the unit continues to download the rest of the file in the background. That's pretty clever.

But, more than the hardware, VUDU seems to have managed to do something no one else has yet been able to do, including Apple - they've already negotiated content deals with every major studio - except Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as several independent studios.
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[It's] headed by people with a lot of experience - two of them are ex-TiVo employees. Edward Lichty, VUDU's Chief Operating Officer, spent eight years at TiVo. VUDU's Vice President of Engineering, Andy Goodman, was the second hire on TiVo's software team ... VUDU is a 41 person company ... more than a quarter of the company is ex-TiVo.

Paul Stamatiou has questions:

How long does one get to watch the movie they have paid for? Is it considered a purchase or a rental? Can I skip and fast-forward easily? What if I have two Vudu units in the same house - do they all work under the same user “account”.. I mean, if someone purchased a movie on one unit a few days ago, can it be watched on the other? How long does content stay on one’s drive considering the unique peer-to-peer network model? What if my ISP is strict about upload/download limits - can I limit the amount of P2P sharing my Vudu unit does? If I paid for and watched The Matrix three months ago and it has expired (if Vudu does this) already, can I watch it again at a discounted rate?

Larry Borsato spots another fly in the ointment:

My internet provider, Rogers, throttles peer to peer traffic, which is exactly what Vudu uses. Oops, I meant to say that they employ bandwidth management. Either way, Vudu won't work for Rogers customers. And if providers like AT&T get their way where network neutrality is concerned and start prioritizing traffic, it won't work for them either ... Besides that, have you looked at movies today? They are barely worth the trip to the Blockbuster, let alone the cost of a trip to the theater.
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If Vudu is going to be successful they are going to have to overcome the attitude of the carriers that giving you any bandwidth at all is doing you a favor, and find some decent movies.

James Lewin delivers the killer blows:

The company has enough startup capital to emply 41 people, yet it doesn’t have the net & marketing smarts to secure [vudu.com].
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You’d have to save a lot of money on DVD purchases to justify the $300 cost of a Vudu.
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[It] ignores one of the fastest-growing areas of content on the Web, video podcasts and Internet video.
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Dead on arrival.

Buffer overflow:

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Previously in IT Blogwatch

• Go get Longhorn beta 3 (and sheep is not poodle)
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• Older posts

And finally... Steven Hawking in vomit comet

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.