Vudu Set-Top Box Weds Legal P2P and HD Movies

prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running a story on a Silicon Valley company that is planning to revolutionize the movie business. It's no secret that the movie-going experience has been deteriorating, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, run by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. That could enables the movie studios to make movies securely available to viewers on the day of release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others: 'DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.'"

Comments

Re:Do people care?

[jZnat]

All that blockyness was smudged into an acceptable picture on your 32" Tube TV set. that nice crisp 720P display shows all the digital cable glory of blocks and artifacts. Maybe you never watch cartoons, but I can see the artifacts all the time on my 20-something inch standard-definition TV in my room over here. We have Dish Network, but I've seen worse (e.g., Comcast Digital Cable). I blame the fact that they're still using MPEG-2 video encoding; they could up the quality quite a bit and still save bandwidth if they were using MPEG-4 ASP or AVC, VC1, Theora (VP3), or VP7 to name a few modern video codecs.

It's like the people that claim that XM and Sirius sounds as good as a CD... These people must be blind as the sattelite radio people must be deaf. Maybe you haven't listened to XM or Sirius on a car stereo, but I don't notice any real differences in an environment like that, and I'm an audiophile even! Then again, I typically listen to Sirius 27 (heavy metal) and 23 (80's rock), and that sort of music typically compresses better than jazz or classical music (which I have stored only as FLAC in my collection). I don't know the exact specs, but what's played on satellite radio is much better fidelity than on typical radio (FM band), and is better quality than most crap you could get on popular P2P networks (which excludes IRC and BitTorrent where "high quality" MP3s and higher quality FLACs dominate). Besides, I like to use Sirius (along with sites like Last.fm) to find new music to buy on CD or via sites like Magnatune that sell FLACs.

Once again, I'd like to complain that some of my favourite cartoons (Futurama, Ed Edd 'n Eddy, any anime, Fairly Oddparents, Jimmy Neutron (which is 3d CGI anyhow which should compress better than cartoons), and many others; by the way, I'm 19) look like total ass when compressed digitally over these networks. I'd hate to see that stretched to fit a resolution like 1440x1080 (4:3 on 1080p), so I agree that this nasty compression is preventing many people from wanting to switch to HD.