Brian's Brain

As previously promised, I watched the already-downloaded HD version of The Bourne Identity from VUDU on Friday night. The Dolby Digital surround sound quality was excellent, and the H.264 video quality was also quite good (albeit perhaps a bit softer than I remembered it being on HD DVD...and I didn't have access to a standard-definition DVD of the film for comparison purposes, either). In fact, I'm multitask-viewing The Bourne Supremacy in HD as I type this on a Sunday evening.

That's the good news. But (ever notice how there always seems to be a but...?) unfortunately my story's not over. In fact it's only begun...and the remainder of my tale isn't near as upbeat. Mid-morning Friday, as I was (unsuccessfully...Monday morning followup: fixed!) trying once again to add a fifth HomePlug AV adapter to my powerline network, I happened to notice the activity LEDs on my router blinking like crazy (2.5 MByte AVI video clip, Cinepak-encoded).

Which was odd, because I wasn't consciously doing anything LAN- or WAN-intensive from a bandwidth standpoint. My first fear was that my Internet-accessible NAS (whose HDD array was audibly churning away at the time) might have gotten hacked...but then I saw the activity LEDs on the HomePlug AV adapter blinking in sync with their router peers.

Ok, so something on a powerline spur was pushing or pulling the bits. But the Apple TV, PS3 and Xbox 360 in the living room were all off, as were the Power Macs in the office. So what could it be? Oh, yeah...the VUDU box in the bedroom. As I discussed in Friday morning's writeup, VUDU caches previews, meta data and the first few minutes of every film in the company's rental-and-purchase library (as well as, of course, the full contents of each film that's subsequently rented or purchased for download) on a portion of its voluminous 250 GByte HDD. And as I alluded to in Friday morning's writeup, P2P sharing of that material between VUDU users' hardware, as a means of offloading VUDU's own server(s), is fiscally fundamental to the company's business model.

Here's some relevant quotes from the review guide I received (bolding by yours truly):

VUDU uses technology developed over the past three years to deliver movies instantly over the Internet directly to your TV. VUDU employs a unique distribution network model that enables cost-effective and efficient delivery of movies to each home. In addition, VUDU pre-positions content across the network and caches previews and meta-data on each box to create an instant and uninterrupted viewing experience.

Less than 10% of the hard drive is used solely for content storage for the distributed network.

I wasn't actively downloading any new video material at the time, and since the VUDU box had been up since Wednesday afternoon, I was pretty sure its trailer and 'meta data' cache was up to date. So the VUDU-initiated network traffic was likely upriver in nature and, as such, was of concern from a VoIP-contention standpoint, in particular depending on how completely it was consuming my ~400 Kbps upstream pipe (and in spite of the fact that VoIP streams get QoS priority).

Continue reading with 'VUDU: Their Cost Savings=Your Headaches'...