AfterDawn: News

VUDU to offer Blu-ray-esque HD downloads?

According to an Engadget report, the popular Internet-based movie and TV show rental store VUDU may begin offering HD downloads "equal in quality to Blu-ray movies" soon and is already currently in private beta testing for the new content format, which is dubbed HDX.

If the report is true, the downloads will be over 6GB large and the company would need to address the added lead-in time that is necessary for such a long download. The downloads would take over 2 hours in most cable cases, and over 4 for most DSL users.



The company currently offers SD as well as HD downloads but it appears it is aiming for the high-end home theater owner with this new HDX codec. The custom Vudu XL product offers one terabyte of capacity so this new move does not seem so far fetched.

There was no word from VUDU about the report so there is no details on when HDX will be publicly available, if it becomes available at all. There was no word on pricing however it will certainly be more expensive than the current $5.99 USD VUDU charges for HD rentals.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 10 Sep 2008 23:41

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• 4 comments

• OneMember

  Its over 6GB so what kind of software is needed for downloading?

  11.9.2008 04:51 #1

• oappi

  With best adsl you can have 24/1 connection so it is ~2.5mb/s which makes it less than 1 hour of download but you have to live next to dslam to get that speed =) i live 8.5 km (1.6x if you want miles) from dslam and i have 8/1 and thats 2 hours download time. I bet service wont be that fast because cap will be on their servers unless if it uses torrent. Lets see how this turns out. i would quess it is no match for blu-ray.
  
  where i live renting blue-ray movie is 5€ with membership (in u.s dollars about $7.30). on the otherhand if you havent invested on bd drive it might me quite tempting to go for vudu.
  
  Still it is only renting. Most likely there will be drm to stop you from making copies out of it and even if you could make copies current mainstream hdd will fail someday and all data including movies are gone.
  
  Still it will be nice try what ever the out come will be.

  11.9.2008 06:34 #2

• error5

  VUDU Box = $299
  HD Rental = $5.99
  BluRay-esque rental = >$5.99
  
  At those prices I'd rather go with Netflix or Blockbuster or even with Dish or Comcast HD VOD. At 6GB I would say this would be severely compressed and without lossless sound (BluRay lite?).
  
  Anyway, when does your 24-hour time limit start? Does it start at the beginnning of the download - which could take 2 hours or more - or does it start when the download ends?
  
  Plus I thought there was a rumor that VUDU was going bankrupt.

  11.9.2008 08:01 #3

• DXR88

  
  
  
  nuff said

  12.9.2008 11:36 #4