Review: Vudu Movie Service (Part 1)

What do you think of when you hear about voodoo and movies?

How about Major League’s Pedro Cerrano making offerings to Jobu to banish fear out of his bats? How about a scare tactic used against Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep? Or how about a convoluted plot of revenge in the Blue Bayou between Denise Richards, Neve Campbell, and Matt Dillon in Wild Things?

Did you ever imagine this?

Vudu.com is a new on-line movie service letting customers rent or buy movies using their sleek Vudu box. Vudu joins Tivo, AppleTV, Netflix, and Joost (to some extent) in the watch-at-home movie market.

Thanks to a grassroots viral marketing campaign by a dedicated employee, I managed to get a Vudu box to witness Vudu’s movie magic. Let’s take a look.

Me and Movies
Me and movies? I’ve been to two movies in about two years - Star Wars III and X-Men: The Last Stand where everyone dies. That’s it. So, I’m no critic, and my only recent exposure to films has been watching trailers.

There are other sources for movies you say? How about a Tivo partnered with Amazon Unbox? Sorry, for some reason, I never cared for Tivo’s monthly subscription fees. How about an AppleTV along with the iTunes Store? I’m still an old school holdout without a HDTV unlike these guys. Until my current set breaks, I’m sticking with it, and that’s why no AppleTV since it only supports newer television sets with HDMI or component video. I’m looking for the composite yellow or S-video port. Netflix is good, and I used to be a subscriber. Again those monthly fees started buggin’ me especially when I watched very few discs in a month. I don’t got the time to keep watching flicks or have the effort to burn copies of the discs. So there went Netflix. Joost? Well, it’s neat and looks good on my big screen Mac, but content is lacking. Watching a channel only of Transformers cartoons is fun for only so long.

My movie profile summarized - I don’t like monthly subscription fees (sorry Tivo and Netflix). I need to support my retro, analog television set (sorry AppleTV), and I want some decent selection of content (sorry Joost and iTunes Store).

Welcome to Vudu
The Vudu service is at the sweet spot of fitting my needs. Users buy or rent movies without any monthly fees. The cost of movies is reasonable ranging from $3 to rent up to $20 to own ($24 for HD movies). And content selection is good with nearly 5000 movies and now television shows.

Here are a few obligatory unboxing shots.

The Vudu packaging (the box is heavy!)