Brian's Brain

Speaking of Internet video distribution...when I last mentioned VUDU, a longstanding focus area here at Brian's Brian, the company had just laid off 20% of its staff and had added porn to its content repertoire. One month later, what's changed? Encouraging developments, at least at first glance. The company's bundling $200 in free movie credits with each box sold at Best Buy. It's also now offering high bitrate 'HDX' versions of its high-definition titles, at no incremental rental cost to conventional high-def counterparts.

Given my past criticism of VUDU's high-def video quality, you might think I'd be thrilled with the news. And I was...until I took a closer look. As the below screenshot shows, the HDX version of a title takes substantially longer to download than its conventional HD counterpart:

When I first heard about VUDU's no-added-cost HDX plans, I was therefore initially confused; wouldn't the incremental storage and delivery bandwidth incurred by the company unduly eat into its profit? But then I recalled that VUDU relied on a P2P model for content distribution...and the light bulb went on in my head.

My VUDU box is (or more accurately was...keep reading...) router-tethered via a HomePlug AV powerline spur, so it's pretty easy for me to monitor its network access patterns by viewing the activity lights on the corresponding Actiontec HPE200AV adapter. About a week before VUDU launched HDX (and in preparation for the launch to come, I now realize), I noticed that the VUDU box (which had already monopolized my DSL connection much more than I preferred) was constantly doing data transfers. By constantly, I mean 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Ever since then, my VoIP sessions have suffered from frequent dropouts, 'ack' responses to 'pings' I make to various servers have been substantially delayed, and network clients have generally suffered from degraded LAN and WAN performance.

Last Sunday, I finally had enough. I powered down the VUDU box, and network performance returned to normal. I'm keeping it that way; as far as I'm concerned, VUDU will never again dominate any network I'm responsible for. You're therefore going to have to take David Pogue's word on HDX's claimed 'insane sharpness', because you'll get no quality review from me. Anyway, I'm skeptical that HDX's incremental image improvement will lead to success with mainstream consumers. A big part of the appeal of Internet-delivered video is the instant-gratification factor...instead of getting in your car, driving to the video store, finding out that the movie you want isn't available and settling for a less appealing alternative, then driving home, you can punch a few buttons on a remote control and, within a minute or few, be enjoying the exact title you want to watch.

Now consider the HDX scenario. 11+ hours is by no means instant gratification. In fact, it far exceeds the roundtrip video store alternative. Granted, I realize that you can queue up a download in the morning, either from the box or online via account access, and it'll be ready to go that evening...but where's the spontaneity in that? And will the average consumer notice the claimed quality improvement, anyway? It's a funny thing about video compression, which I've seen time and time again in my own testing; up to a certain point, increasing the compressed bitrate makes substantive improvements in the quality results but, past that codec-, setting- and content-dependent threshold, the return on the incremental bitrate investment rapidly disappears.

Here's my theory, and it's at the root of my disappointment with VUDU's continued P2P reliance. I suspect that the company has given up on capturing a sustainable beachhead versus bigger online distribution competitors such as Amazon, Apple and Netflix. Instead, it's (in true dot-com tradition) throwing out any pretense of securing a profit, in favor of garnering as large a customer base as possible as quickly as possible, and in the hopes of finding a bigger-pocketed buyer. It's burning through its accumulated hardware inventory via a Best Buy fire sale. And it's making its loyal early adopter customers shoulder the incremental bandwidth burden, caps and throttles be damned.