IP Democracy: Vudu is Dead-on-Arrival

Take note of the name of the latest Internet video-to-TV start-up and you’d better do it fast: Vudu. Because it soon will join the junk-heap of add-on set-top based TV technology failures such as MovieBeam and Akimbo. But you’d never know it by reading David Pogue’s column today, which discusses the new offering.

Vudu is a service that offers Internet access to 5,000 movies, delivered to the TV set via a $400 set-top box. Although Pogue and other reviewers of the new device sprinkle their write-ups with skepticism, they still play it straight, acting as if it’s a possibility that consumers will fork over $400 for yet another set-top box to layer on top of the already-frustrating jumble of electronics sitting atop TV sets today, including but not limited to digital cable or satellite set-tops, DVRs, gaming consoles and emerging new appliances such as Apple TV or the SlingBox.

Won’t happen. The Vudu is DOA, no matter how good the picture quality, or how large Vudu’s catalog of rentable films becomes. Very few predictions in the media and Internet world can be made this bluntly, but any TV-based business that is predicated on yet another set-top simply won’t fly.

It would be one thing if Vudu served an unmet need. But, Vudu’s doom is all the more guaranteed because all Vudu delivers is movies, or as Pogue notes

If you had to make a master list of all the world’s problems, “limited access to movies” probably wouldn’t appear until Page 273,996.

Consumers have access to hundreds of thousands of films via DVD rental, cable premium channels, on-demand services and pay-per-view. On top of this, gaming platform giants Microsoft, and soon Sony, will offer movies-for-download via their already installed video gaming consoles. Moreover, from iTunes to Walmart to Amazon.com, in-home movie access is suddenly everywhere.

Who in the world is going to rush out and plunk down $400 for an additional set-top, the most hated device in the home, when all they can get is arguably higher quality display of rented (and purchased) films? Particularly given that the movies cost just about what you’d pay for DVD rentals or on-demand access: $.99 to $3.99 for rentals (and $4.99 to $19.99 for purchase). Or As Rafat Ali smartly notes in his headline about the Vudu, the “idiots” are in the box.

USA Today’s Edward Baig also sums it nicely when he writes “it’s hard to justify the price of admission when there are so many other ways to catch a flick at home.”

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on September 6, 2007 9:16 AM to IP Democracy