Vudu Moving Mass Market, Signs Four New Hardware Partners
LAS VEGAS -- Vudu, a darling of specialty A/V channels, is going high volume, the company is announcing at this week’s CES. With a movie library of some 20,000 titles, the streaming content provider is starting its own Internet application platform to take on Yahoo, adding four new CE hardware partners and expanding current agreements with Mitsubishi, LG and Vizio. The end result is that “Vudu will be in millions of devices by the end of 2010, a scale we could never have hoped to achieve by selling our own box,” Executive Vice President Edward Lichty told us.
Vudu’s new hardware partners include Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba. Samsung will fold Vudu into its Samsung Apps platform. Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba are new partners for Vudu Apps, a new delivery platform for Internet applications and services via the TV. Vudu Apps will be available on Ethernet TVs from Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba and on Blu-ray players from Toshiba. Vudu Apps launched at CES with 100 providers including Pandora, Picasa, Flickr, Wikipedia, Good Morning America, Dailymotion, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Facebook, Twitter, NBC Nightly News and other music, technology, science and news sites.
Despite trailing Yahoo to market with a connected TV Internet platform, Vudu believes its streaming structure gives it the edge, Lichty said. “We have a vendor-neutral, cloud-based applications program,” he said. “The software we put on the device is an engine that renders and delivers applications that live in the cloud. We can author, control, update and manage the application like it’s a Web service.” That allows fast, frequent and uniform updates across all devices versus client-based applications that are unique to the devices they're on and have to be updated separately by hardware manufacturers. All the new partner agreements include TVs, and Vizio and Toshiba will add Vudu Apps as a feature in Blu-ray players as well.
Mitsubishi was the first TV vendor to add Vudu to its feature set last summer, and LG followed in the fall with both TVs and Blu-ray players. Vizio also said a Vudu series is due to ship early this year, bringing the number of publicized Vudu SKUs to eight. The number will inflate to dozens of models at CES, Lichty said, from those manufacturers alone.
All Vudu Apps service providers announced at its start are free applications, leaving Vudu as the only premium service in the Apps stable, the company said. Vudu movies range from 99 cents a title for standard-definition rental videos to $24.99 for purchased movies in Vudu’s proprietary 1080p format. Consumers will sign up online and provide a credit card that will be charged on a per-transaction basis.
Vudu began its movie service in 2007 via its own set-top box, a hard disk-based device with an Ethernet connection and storage. Vudu still sells boxes but Lichty said it remains to be seen whether the company will manufacture more than it has in inventory. “The future of distribution is definitely the embedded model,” he said. LG plans to ship a Vudu- enabled Blu-ray player with 256 GB of on-board storage this March. That player will be able to store purchased Vudu content, he said.
The streaming Vudu platform gives TVs and Blu-ray players additional functionality. Since the interface is uniform, users who purchase a title can begin watching a movie on one Vudu-enabled product in the living room, and resume watching on a different product in the bedroom from the spot where they paused the film. The company is looking at additional product categories such as game players and other connected devices in the living room, Lichty said. Mobile devices present another possible model, he said, although wireless network capabilities are at least 2 years out.
With the new partners announced at CES, Vudu will have agreements with seven of the nine biggest TV makers, Lichty noted. The company is in talks with Sony and Panasonic but no announcements are on the horizon.