As a bit of light hearted relief for a Friday afternoon, we’re going to try a special article each week on a Friday, and highlight some gadget not available in the UK which we think should be!

This week, the Vudu HD Movie Streamer…

The Vudu allows you to stream HD movies over your Broadband connection to watch. You buy the hardware ($399), and then pay for each movie, exactly like going to your favourite DVD rental store, except without having to leave home. However, you can either watch a movie, like renting a DVD ($0.99 to $3.99) or purchase the movie to be downloaded onto the device, like buying a DVD ($4.99 to $19.99). Not all movies are available for rent and download though, although they try to get new DVD releases into their system within 5 days of the DVD being released, and currently have over 5,000 titles available.

If you lived in the US, you would need at least a 2.2Mbps Broadband connection for instant viewing of a movie, but if you are happy to wait for it to download first, you only need a 1.2Mbps connection.

It has an HDMI socket, although not all movies are being broadcast in the higher HD formats, and can store roughly 100 hours of movies (although there are plans to allow you to increase this via external USB storage next year). It currently comes with a couple of permanent download movies included.

We were unable to confirm if Vudu have any plans to bring this product to the UK market.

Thanks to AutomatedHome.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.