$99 Roku Netflix player gets HD, Vudu gets $200 price drop

The bargain-basement streaming Netflix player finally gets an HD upgrade, while the pricey Vudu box — which has offered HD movies for many moons now — is temporarily on sale for $99, a whopping $200 price drop.

Owners of the $99 Roku player—which lets you streaming about 13,000 of Netflix's "Watch Instantly" titles for free, as long as you're a subscriber—started getting the HD firmware upgrade over the weekend, according to Zatz Not Funny. Only about 300 streaming Netflix titles are currently available in HD (720p, to be exact); still, it's a major step forward for the bargain player, which before now had a top video resolution of just 480i. Even better: A message on the new Roku splash screen promises "a number of great new channels" for 2009. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, the $299 Vudu set-top box—which now offers more than 1,000 HD titles for rent—just got a $200 price drop, bringing its sticker price down to … yep, $99, same as the Roku player. One caveat, according to Engadget HD: You must cough up an additional $50 in pre-paid rentals for the (temporary) $99 sale price.

So, here's the question: $99 for the Roku Netflix player, which offers just a few hundred HD movies but thousands of SD movies (albeit not the latest releases), all free for Netflix subscribers—or $99 for Vudu, with more than a thousand HD titles, many of them new releases, but with à la carte rental pricing ($5.99 to 99 cents each)? Or … will you stick to the free ad-supported movies on Hulu? Cast your vote below.

Related:
Roku Netflix Box Now Streaming HD (For Some) [Zatz Not Funny!]
VUDU price dramatically slashed to $99* for the holidays [Engadget HD]