Sounds Like Vudu: P2P Video Direct to the TV, Fast
The New York Times this morning spends a good amount of real estate on a small Silicon Valley company called Vudu, which is selling a free-standing, streaming video set-top box. The device is similar to Apple TV, but requires no connection with a PC to operate. The Vudu box connects directly to the Internet via an Ethernet port.
Vudu says its box will allow viewers to begin watching movies in the living room immediately after order, without having to wait for a significant portion of the file to download in advance.
I hear P2P for real-time streaming and I'm immediately skeptical.
Like BitTorrent's movie service, Vudu relies on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to push video quickly down to the set-top box. But the BitTorrent service is testament to the fact that without a critical mass of "peers" or "seeds" for a given title, downloading can be very slow going. Two friends in the digital content world say BitTorrent, the poster child of P2P, is now getting help from a content delivery network (CDN) (like Akamai) to speed video distribution.
Vudu is not the first company to serve video directly to a box on the TV. Akimbo began selling such a box in 2004. Moviebeam's set-top box catches videos broadcast over the digital frequencies used by public radio stations. Neither of these products has caught on with consumers.
Vudu will also compete with hybrid IP video devices like Microsoft's Xbox, which downloads movies from the Xbox Live Marketplace. Tivo downloads movies from Amazon's Unbox movie service. Apple TV relies on a PC running iTunes to download the video.
In the NYT article, Vudu boasts that Hollywood has seen the light on its product. It has signed content deals with all the major studios except Sony.
Big deal. Hollywood is increasingly willing to sign up for online distribution, provided the normal, paranoid digital rights management (DRM) controls are in place. What have they got to lose? It's a great way for them to make some money back on lame or otherwise unpopular titles that are rarely rented at the video store or sold as DVDs.
The studios seem far from making Internet video a primary means of distributing their content, as DVDs are now. While some big movies like Borat and Pirates of the Caribbean have shown up relatively quickly on the online services, the majority of the videos you find there are Hollywood no-names and direct-to-DVD releases circa 2000-2006.
The idea of bringing video directly to the TV via the Internet without stopping at the PC is a good one. But services like Vudu will have to deliver new, big-name movies consistently in order for consumers to even consider paying $300 for yet another piece of hardware in the living room.
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