VUDU Offers $200 Discount at Best Buy Stores Nationwide

[Shane]

VUDU Inc. today announced a nationwide promotion only available at Best Buy that should help chase away the winter and lighten the pressure of delivering that "tah-dah" gift this holiday season: a $299 VUDU bundle which includes a VUDU Internet Movie Player and $200 worth of movie credits.

VUDU is the only service to offer...

[url=http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/news/2008/11/vudu_offers_200_discount_at_best_buy_stores_nationwide.php]Read Bulletin[/url]

[jborchel]

If anyone in my community buys this VuDu and downloads any HD movie they will bring our wireless broadband system to a crawl. The Bit Torrent type of technology used by VuDu, P2P I believe, kills wi-fi systems.

Shane, correct me if I'm wrong.

Jack

[Shane]

Tell me more about your community wireless broadband. What are the data rates you experience?

I don't recall the specifics, but VUDU will throttle itself based on your bandwidth, and will not exceed 3Mbit/s. So while you may experience slower download times, or longer delay between purchase and watching, it should not affect others accessibility to the network.

I've seen no reports of this killing any systems, wi-fi or otherwise. If you have, please post references for further research.

Thanks,

- Shane

[jborchel]

Shane,

We have about fifty users in the community wi-fi system. The system is fed by two T1 lines for an aggregate band width of 3 Mbs/sec. Anytime when there are more than a handful of users and when any one of them initiates a large file transfer the response time will be impacted substantially. I've been told by a wi-fi vendor and a wi-fi chat board that VuDu, similar to Bit Torrent, is a different type of file transfer that depends on multiple addresses, again similar to Bit Torrent, to provide the content. This complex address scheme creates a real challenge to the wi-fi management software and it gets overloaded with address translation types of transactions. To the wi-fi software this is a much more complex problem than just managing a simple file transfer transaction that is most common to internet usage, in particular for this discussion, Netflix, Apple TV, Blockbuster, MovieLink, etc. I would not want to crash my local system every time I downloaded a movie on VuDu.

If this is incorrect I might consider VuDu. If you could contact VuDu engineering and discuss this with them I would certainly be interested in their answer.

Jack

[Shane]

Thanks for the additional info. I'll shoot off an email to them and invite them to respond or participate in the discussion.

- Shane

[vudupatrick]

Jack,

Your inquiry was brought to my attention. I suspect your issue is more of the bandwidth contention variety than it is about the number of connections from any single device on the network. In fact, I