Voom No More

RokaMoka writes "Today the world got a little fuzzier. Voom has announced thay they are shutting down. As a subscriber I can tell you they will be sorely missed, as they far better than the competition. For those of you who are not familiar with voom, they had 3 times as many HiDef channels as the next competitor and a really nice remote control. It sure was pretty while it lasted." I think they died because they don't have a PVR. Hi-Def folks are early adopters and they want the technology. Of course, with all the mess swirling around DirecTV's move to Mpeg4 and the obsolesence of the HD-Tivo, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Comments

Mpeg4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone clue me in about directtv and mpeg4?

Perhaps....

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

if their traditional business model was failing, they could have tried an online business model based on BitTorrent.

I regularly see thousands of peers on torrents for TV shows. If Voom offered HDTV rips of popular shows, they could have had a viable business model - a TV/media form of the clicks-and-bricks model.

Good Riddance.

[Lordfly]

I work at a retail store that sells Dish and Voom... Voom was the laughingstock of the store the second it came in.

It had the feel of a "fly by night" organization... the contractors who came to install it for us hadn't heard of it... the tech support number we had for them was disconnected... their HD Box, which originally sold for 800 dollars (!!) plus installation fees plus 40 bucks a month minimum, was prone to crashing. Their satellite dish locked us out of everything except "demo" mode, which meant we could showcase the exact same stupid animation show every half hour.

Every time we had a customer ask about Voom, we steered them towards Dish. A shame, too, since we got paid more for Voom than for Dish... but we couldn't in our good conscience sell that piece of crap.

Did I mention the HD channels they offered were rotten? A Fashion Show channel (high def anorexia), a Moov channel (a Winamp vis set to music), a couple of black-and-white B movie channels, a few more shitty movie channels, high definition weather (wtf?), and so on. What a waste of bandwidth.

I laughed when I heard they only had 20,000 customers after a year.

Good bye, Voom.

My HDTV Trivails

[DumbSwede]

I had thought about getting Voom and am conflicted about their demise. I hope the Content providers don't draw the wrong conclusions from Voom's failure. I went the homebrew setup way for HDTV with an MyHDTV board and a digital projector. It wasn't until the Olympics this last fall that I could get any HDTV channels OTA. About the same time my Cable provider started offering a small set of HDTV channels and PVRs. I am not happy with the limited selection of HDTV I have, 2 OTA and 6 Cable (one of which is HBO), but over 90% of my viewing is HDTV. If not for Fridays on Sci-Fi it would be about 100 percent.

If there had been an HDTV viewable media at HDTV introduction things would have evolved far differently. High-end equipment owners like myself would have bought HDTV content proving the marked for HDTV content. HDTV sets would have sold because even in HDTV signal deprived areas like the one I live in, people would still have had something to watch. And with more HDTVs, more OTA HDTV transmission would come quicker. With high end users and their larger amounts of disposable income watching mostly HDTV, advertising revenues would have switched to HDTV and again faster adoption.

Of course the poor choice of modulation scheme for US transmission didn't help. There were other more robust schemes, but ignored for cost cutting reasons (which by now would have made no difference I suspect as technology marches on and becomes more affordable).

Of course all this MPEG2 vs MPEG4 and obsoleted equipment that was suppose to be cutting edge HDTV, Joe 6-pack is going to be HDTV shy even longer.

Content providers are scared shitless of the digital age, they know that once this stuff is digital anyone that waits long enough will just be able to snare it for free at whatever quality he or she wants depending on download times. I suspect also that content providers are conflicted about providing upgraded broadband as it will start to eat into their content revenues. Why would I continue to subscribe to HBO when I can just download the episode for free off the same cable?

DirectTV is promising a shit load of channels soon, so maybe this did in Voom as much as anything else. If the DirectTV line is reasonable after the new HDTV channels come on line I will probably ditch Cable and go satellite. It seems I've made the smart move in the mean time with cable, the HDTV and PVR are very affordable, but probably aren't MPEG4 compliant. Soon I will have my Blu-Ray player, 20+ HDTV channels and viewing nirvana.

For those that think I'm a little over the top on my TV viewing, I suspect I watch an average or below average amount. But what I do watch is on a glorious 10-foot screen and I only want razor sharp images on it. I spent about $4000-$5000 putting my system together and I want to get the most out of it. I personally don't understand why people would pay $50-$100 a month for cable or $600-$1200 a year, and then watch it on a $200 set from Wal-Mart.