Walmart’s streaming service Vudu hits Apple TV | Hacker News Reader

Walmart’s streaming service Vudu hits Apple TV

techcrunch.com

31 pointssib33 comments

As of writing, Vudu offers content with a few different business models, but none of them are based around a monthly subscription. This doesn't exist.

Instead, depending on the title, Vudu offers a short-term pay-per-view option to "Rent" and a buy-once stream-anytime option to "Own". It has other content that's accessible ad-supported for no fee.

Additionally, it's a participant in both UltraViolet and Disney's equivalent, which are services that assert DRM authorizations, so Vudu will stream content that UV or Disney asserts the user has rights for; retail discs' bonus "Digital Copy" is handled this way, and they also offer a Vudu-branded equivalent to a core UltraViolet service where you attest that you own a physical copy, and they give you DRM rights for a digital copy at a low price point.

In a way, this all sounds pretty arcane and complicated, and is a lot closer to movie studios' and TV pay-per-view providers' mid-2000s view of the world than to the landscape as envisioned by today's Netflix or Hulu -- but that also sets Vudu apart. It's more comparable to iTunes, or Google Play, or Amazon's for-purchase options, or even the Microsoft Store or the PlayStation Network, or half a dozen other players in this space; most of which have a tendency to be closely tied to a particular computing platform, often to the point of that network being unavailable on the outside.

On that metric, Vudu offers multiplatform presence and longstanding relationships with a wide range of movie studios, and seamless integration into the studios' physical-to-digital ecosystem, but is woefully underutilized by its corporate parent.

With the rise of all of these new streaming services I wonder if we will see a golden age of internet piracy. No one is going to want to pay hundreds of dollars a month just to get different brands of content.

It's funny because I came from being a huge pirate as a young man, and then like most people made the transition to paying for content once I had the money to pay for content. Now it is beginning to swing the other way, and I'm wondering why I pay three different services for essentially the same thing, they all downgrade the video file, and this just so the same studio execs who always fucked us decided to have another go?

I think its better this way, coming closer to a la carte content, since I can more accurately vote with my wallet and viewing habits and no longer subsidize content I'm not interested in. I'm willing to accept a higher price for the stuff I actually watch as a result.

I think the subsidation is actually kind of neat actually. I may subsidize a ton of stuff I'll never watch for a bunch of other people but they're simultaneously subsidizing a bunch of niche programs for me which may never have been produced otherwise due to the niche nature of the content.

Similarly by buying the package deal instead of the individual content there's mors opportunity for me to discover content I might otherwise never come across just by having access to the opportunity to browse big long lists of random stuff available to me.

In a way it allows me to both delve deeper into my bubble while also giving me ways to escape it.

That being said, I kind of miss and sometimes return to the good ol' antenna where a show may play once or twice and turn off. I never find binging a show actually provides me anywhere near the enjoyment that watching a show once a week and building anticipation does.

Unfortunately that is how you get clickbait and cookie cutter risk free sequels.

Markets need to figure out a way for good artists to get discovered + profit from that since if everyone pirated, no revenue from transacting the stream.

"No one is going to want to pay hundreds of dollars a month just to get different brands of content."

Hundreds of dollars? No. But $10/mo here and there? Sure, yes, of course. The only people for whom that's not true are people who value money more than their time (i.e. young people, college kids, etc) and those people have always preferred piracy.

I'm in my mid-30s, with a career, and other interests. The value of piracy would have to swing wildly in the other direction before I'd be even a little bit interested (and this equation is only going to become less balanced as I start a family).

I'd rather just pay.

This is true. I don't have cable, but I do Netflix, and buy shows/movies I want from Google Play. I could spend hours looking for a rip of the last MotoGp race, which takes equally long to download, or spend $1.99 on it.

Vudu is more like... an iTunes than a Netflix though. I'm actually a little surprised they reached an agreement here.

imo Apple TV is superior to either Fire TV or Android TV. However the problem with Apple TV is that until this fall it didn't have enough cheap content beyond Hulu and Netflix. I don't recall iTunes having regular sales like either Amazon Prime or Vudu. Bringing in Vudu and Amazon Video solves this problem.

Everything except that damn remote.

While Vudu is a streaming service, it operates on a transaction model, rather than a subscription one. Customers pay for only what they use. Because of that, and similar to iTunes, Vudu customers get access to movies very soon after the theatrical release, as opposed to most licensed content on subscription services, which is typically years old.

It's funny, there were people saying this exact thing 20 years ago when people were demanding ala carte channel buying from cable companies. They were saying "yeah you are not going to like paying $x per channel."

I was not one of them but they turned out to be right. When this gains momentum people are going to be subscribing to like 5 channels at $5/mo each before they think they are paying to much. And you will have to decide between those 5 channels or say NHL for the year @ $100 USD. Or maybe you want NFL for $150 or whatever crazy rate they charge. HBO?

It's going to add up fast and most people are not going to like the fact that to get all the channels they want they are going to need to pony up some hefty cash per month.

IMO.

It's pretty easy to rack up a streaming bill already.

Hulu + Netflix + HBO is like $40/mo. When we tried Swing for sports, it was up to like $70/mo. Funimation was another $10/mo -- bringing it up to like $80/mo.

You get better service than cable (especially for more niche things), but it can be expensive and sports aren't quite there yet.

Still seems pretty cheap to me. I pay $12 to Netfix, HBO GO is free with my internet subscription (okay, the Cable co gives me "free" lifeline cable + HBO GO for less money than internet-only, they're that desperate to count me as a subscriber).. and $100/yr to NFL.com to stream games. Plus whatever I pay for in Prime/AppleTV content. $20/mo is a hell of a lot cheaper than I've ever gotten out the door for with Cable TV.

I don't have anything to add other than I had no idea Walmart owned Vudu.

Ditto, though it does explain why they push it in the Walmart app.

(For the uninitiated: if you buy a Blu Ray from Walmart that comes with a copy through Vudu, you get notified if you use Walmart Pay to redeem it immediately.)

I have 2 Apple TV's, 3 Rokus. I've found that I never turn on my Apple TVs. The only thing I lose is access to a few movies I bought on ITunes. The walled-garden nature of Apple's ecosystem and their unwillingness to allow other services full access is a total turnoff.

You have to deal with Roku UX and their apps' UX then, though. The spotify Roku app is a particularly terrible one when I tried a couple months ago. Went back to the store and got a Chromecast later the same night.

(Spotify, of course, is also a problem on Apple TV, though - but overall I find Chromecast + ATV, or FireTV, way better than Roku, if you've got the budget. Or just Xbox One.)

I rarely stream music through the home theater, but we prefer the Roku over casting for anything except ad-hoc, youtube type clip watching.

it has an app store now. the only notable exception i can think of is amazon videos and that's at least "coming soon". what can't you do at this point?

do the streaming apps on apple tv offer the content in good quality?

i have some cheap tvs and notice the roku performs way better than the native apps

My "smart TV" handles most services so I use it for Amazon and Youtube and Netflix where I can get 4k streaming.

AppleTV does.. iTunes rented content and NFL.com stuff, plus HBO Go (stuff the TV either doesn't offer, or the AppleTV does better and isn't available in 4k in either place).

Vudu sounds an awful lot like Hulu...

That's like if someone made a burger chain called McDonny... Everyone would recognize the connection immediately.

I don't see it. Your example is much more obvious.

Incidentally, the Vudu name pre-dates the public announcement of the 'Hulu' name by at least one month, but has been attested for longer. The 'Hulu' name was unveiled [1] in August 2007 for a then-unnamed project [2]. Vudu, on the other hand, has trademark filings in July 2007, and was previously known as Marquee, and before that, Vvond [3], but there are articles from earlier in 2007 already calling the company Vudu.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070930180547/http://www.thestr...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070930180547/http://www.thestr...

[3] https://gigaom.com/2007/04/29/is-that-the-vudu-magic/

Vudu sounds like voodoo

I have only used Vudu a couple of times in the past. What I would be interested in is a paper or someone able to tell me about their HDX format? I was impressed with the visual quality of that when it first came out. Does anyone have any details on that format?

A 2008 TechCrunch article has an uncited blockquote about it [1]. From that verbiage, it appears it's H.264 produced with a good encoder, likely some custom quantizer matrices (vs. the default flat matrices, to allocate less detail to dark scenes and more to brighter scenes), less aggressive deblocking (to reduce smudging and impart 'fake sharpness'), ABR-like capped VBR -- similar to bit-reservoir MP3; multi-pass encoding, some tunings for film grain preservation (or emulation?), and maybe a sharpen filter.

If you've ever used x264, all of the above techniques are common advice to encode film material, except for the use of multi-pass encoding, which is being used by Vudu to make the file more CBR-like in the beginning, and gradually attain VBR.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/02/vudu-officially-announces-...

Thank you very much! That is very interesting.

Handy, since it's frequently cheaper to get an HD digital copy of a movie by buying the bundled Blu-Ray on Amazon at a deep discount then downloading on Vudu than it is to buy the file from Amazon or Apple.

With a spare higher-quality Blu-Ray as a bonus!

I couldn't ever get closed captions to work on Vudu, so that killed it for me.

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