Planet Gadgets Gadget Blog

Vudu Set-Top Box

by Darren

Video on demand has been hyped literally for years. But now the Vudu set top box is achieving some of the potential, with over 5,000 movies available.

First announced back in April, the Vudu ($400) is a relatively unobtrusive, four-pound box containing a 250GB hard drive (enough for 100 hours of standard-def movies; a pair of USB ports will soon allow for additional storage) and an Ethernet port (a broadband Net connection is required). While most Net-connected set-top boxes take upwards of 20-plus minutes to download a two-hour standard-def movie, the Vudu starts playing immediately. How? The box comes pre-loaded with the first 30 seconds of the most popular movies (the snippets download in the background onto unused portions of the hard drive), and thanks to peer-to-peer networking (think Napster 1.0—minus the piracy thing, of course), each working Vudu box shares the load in terms of downloading any given movie.

Some of the movies are available for rent only through the system, which might be an issue t9o some.