VUDU Expands Offering

VUDU is the in-home movie rental option that offers high-end HD downloaded movies for the best quality in audio/video of any of the streaming solutions. VUDU is expanding its offering to include web-content and some TV networks to its repertoire of home entertainment features. The company has announced a new feature it has dubbed: VUDU RIA which stands for Rich Internet Application. Initially it will provide users 120 channels of web-content through the VUDU set top box.

The plan is to let VUDU compete toe-to-toe with the bigger providers in the movie set-top-box space like TiVo that has been offering internet content for some time. But the VUDU difference is of course that it does HD. The fact that VUDU’s web-content application, RIA is a platform designed to attract developers to create even more content is definitely an advantage.

Among the Internet content will be Flickr, YouTube and Picasa.  The initial 120 stations are slated to  include some HD television. These will include shows like Today, MTV News and Anderson Cooper 360.