Pricey Vudu XL Stores 500 Movies

I may have named the Vudu movie set-top box one of my favorite gadgets of 2007, but I've made it pretty clear that the $399 price tag needs chopping. Well, here we are at CES, and Vudu has announced a new, bigger box...for a breathtaking $999. Ouch.

The Vudu XL (available starting next month) looks pretty much like the Vudu of old, and it still delivers standard-def movies instantly, provided you've got a decent broadband connection (HD movies required at least a 4MB connection for instant watching). But the XL ups the storage ante with a massive 1TB hard drive, compared to 250GB for the original Vudu. That's good for 500 standard-def movies, or (by my reckoning, at least) between 100 and 125 HD movies. (By the way, Vudu is adding 70 movies to its HD lineup this month, including "Transformers," "Blades of Glory," "The Italian Job," and older "Star Trek" titles; rentals for new HD movies will go for $5.99, while HD "classics" rent for $3.99.)

Pretty nice, but the $999 price tag? Yikes. To be fair, the Vudu XL is aimed at the high-end home theater integration market, but still, that's quite a premium. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for that price drop on the original Vudu box.

Related:
Press release (Vudu)