VUDU to Bring Web Content and HD Television

Remember VUDU? It’s in-home movie rental option that offers high-end HD downloaded movies for the best quality in audio/video of any of the streaming solutions. Now VUDU is adding web-content and some TV networks to its repertoire of home entertainment features. The company has announced a new feature it has dubbed: VUDU RIA which stands for Rich Internet Application. Out of the gate it’ll provide users 120 channels of web-content through the VUDU set top box. 

The plan is to let VUDU compete toe-to-toe with heavies in the movie set-top-box scene like TiVo that has been offering internet content for some time. But the VUDU difference is of course that it does HD. What’s sure to create added excitement about VUDU’s web-content application is that RIA is a platform designed to attract developers to create even more content. Hopefully this will be adopted by third parties who can enchant you with even more VUDU content. 

Among the Internet content will be Flickr, YouTube and Picasa. But the on-demand TV options get my vote as the coolest new VUDU feature. Apparently you’ll get up to 120 stations including some HD television. Staring off you’ll get a few yawn inducing shows like Today, MTV News and Anderson Cooper 360. Okay, so the initial selection could use some sprucing up - but this is just a start. You’ll also get HD content from familiar networks like PBS and National Geographic which is actually quite cool. 

I’ll leave you with a quote from the press release about the RIA platform: 

“Our goal in creating VUDU RIA was to allow anyone with Web development skills to easily author Web-driven applications for the TV,” said Prasanna Ganesan, VUDU’s CTO. “We are very pleased with the results and look forward to opening up VUDU RIA to the developer community.”