Vudu

With the promise of bringing the head and the long tail of movies to your TV, Vudu is a P2P IPTV platform that intends to solve the problem involved in bridging the computer with the home entertainment system by denying the need for a bridge at all! Vudu will offer instant play, on demand movies through a broadband connection to your TV without your computer as a middle man. Vudus product, the Vudu Box, is one more set top box that consumers will have to buy for their entertainment system, yet it will eliminate trips to the rental store, time spent waiting for new movies in the mail and unreliable or slow downloads on your computer. Of course AppleTV has taken a stab at fusing your computer and TV, but downloads from itunes still take a while and are not invulnerable to illegal copying and distribution.

Illegal distribution is the main reason many large and small film studios will not sell their movies as digital downloads. Vudu, however, has been exceptionally good at gaining major film studio support precisely, because Vudus streamed movies will never pass through a computer to get to your TV. Vudus movies will be distributed using P2P technology similar to such purveyors of illegal files as Bit Torrent and the original Napster, yet will only consist of legally licensed content. Vudu has made deals with seven major film studios (Sony is an exception), many more indies and international distributors. Whats special about how these movies will be transmitted to your TV screen is the way which Vudu turns a P2P download into an instant play movie. Vudu will gather data form a network of users like a normal P2P application, yet it will also store the beginnings of its catalog on its own servers. When a user chooses to watch a movie, its beginning will be streamed immediately from Vudu servers while its middle and end are downloaded in the background from the rest of the network and played when appropriate. This hybrid approach makes it feasible to stream a vast index of HD content on demand with the ability to scale at low costs for Vudu and consumers. To ease the process even more Vudu streams content in MPEG-4 format which is then converted to HD.

Managed by a team of veterans from companies such as TiVo, WebTV and Slim Devices, Vudu will take on a variety of on demand competitors when it launches publicly late in 2007. Players already in the field in one form or another include: Joost, Babelgum, Amazon, TiVo, Netflix, Blockbuster, Microsoft Xbox and ReplayTV.