Great Deal on VUDU Box

[bhampton]

article about what it does to your "high speed" internet access...

Digital Tools
Bad Vudu
Lee Gomes, 12.18.08, 06:00 AM EST
Vudu's service is fun--but the company needs to tell its customers exactly how it delivers all those movies.

Before I tell you why you should think twice before buying a Vudu set-top box on account of the lack of disclosure at the heart of the service, I need to tell you how much I once enjoyed my own.

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The geek in me was struck by what I assumed was Vudu's clever use of video servers: How else, I reasoned, could Vudu effectively stream so many high-quality movies to so many customers?

A few days later, I happened to be chatting casually with a Vudu executive and learned what is really going on.

Vudu, it turns out, uses peer-to-peer technology to stream movies to its customers. That means different bits of movies are stored on different Vudus. When you want to watch a movie, it gets assembled from scores, even hundreds, of other Vudu boxes and is then streamed to you.

You might be sitting in your den connected via VPN to your home office and, without your knowledge, your Vudu might be taking up bandwidth to help deliver The Dark Knight to some kid in Tucson.

Users of peer-to-peer software like BitTorrent will be alarmed by this hijacking, because these protocols are notorious bandwidth hogs. They easily use up so much of the network that simple tasks like e-mail or browsing can slow to a crawl.

The big problem is that the company doesn't clearly tell customers that it's doing this. I haven't found a word about this forced downloading on the box I bought or on the company's Web site. My bandwidth is my property, in much the same was my living room or front yard is mine, and I don't take to people using it without telling me.

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The fact is that this sort of forced bandwidth sharing has, from the very beginning, been at the heart of the company's business plan and technology platform. It occurs every time any Vudu customer watches a movie. If Vudu boxes didn't carry that load, the service would grind to a halt.

As a practical matter, I hadn't noticed delays on my own home network. Then again, fewer than 100,000 Vudus have been sold; who knows what will happen should the service get more popular. The company insists I have nothing to worry about and that the product is designed to not impede normal network usage.

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