Regardless of your feelings regarding the VUDU set-top-box, it’s hard to knock its intrigue. From inception, we’ve been hooked on the concept, and while we’ve had our reservations about it, our hopes were bolstered after checking it out at CEDIA. After release, a number of reviewers found the device to be interesting, relatively useful and unfortunately hamstrung, but we still see quite a bit of promise in the box.
In its current form, there’s no denying that the limitations are stifling. Right out of the box, you’re stuck with a smallish internal hard drive that fills up quickly if you prefer your material in high-definition, and even if you look to external HDDs to catch the overflow, you’re still left with content that’s hardly portable. Sure, the port selection is up to snuff, the interface is beyond acceptable and the design is at least moderately sexy, but the inability to transfer content to discs along with the relatively high prices of downloadable media really put a damper on things. Couple that with the expansion of HD VOD and it’s easy to slip your $399 right back where it came from. Still, we’re curious to see how you all would tweak the VUDU to make it a more formidable competitor. Granted, we’ve all ideas that the majority of the changes will involve a massive overhaul of DRM in general, but don’t be scared to think outside of the proverbial box on this one.
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