HD Movies Coming to Vudu

High-def movies from Paramount, Universal, and Lionsgate will soon be on tap for Vudu, the TV set-top box that offers more than 5,000 on-demand movies. It's just not clear how soon the HD flicks will arrive, or how many will be available.

Vudu reps had been hinting for months that HD movies would arrive on the service, which I reviewed last month. But while the Vudu press release confirms that HD films are indeed on the way, there's no word on when they'll go live on the service, how many HD movies we'll see in the first wave, or how much they'll cost.

Still, it's intriguing news if you're looking for better ways to get on-demand HD movies over your TV. The current choices are slim: you've got a handful of cable and IPTV providers with HD movies (and if those carriers aren't offered in your area, you're out of luck), plus HD downloads from online movie retailer CinenaNow, and various HD offerings through the Xbox Video Marketplace. Of course, because of the bandwidth involved, HD movies from CinemaNow and the Xbox Marketplace take a long time to download—sometimes hours, in the case of Xbox Live. Because the $400 Vudu box uses peer-to-peer networking to balance out the server load, downloading massive HD video files could go a lot faster depending on your Net connection—although probably not instantaneously, as with Vudu's standard-def movie offerings.

Of course, an inherent problem with Vudu is price: there's no subscription fee, but the box itself is $400, and you still have to cough up $3 to $4 for each movie rental. Would speedy HD movie downloads sweeten the pill, as long as the movies are reasonably priced (say, in the $5 to $6 range)? Or does the $400 price tag for the Vudu box need to fall (or, perhaps, disappear entirely)?

Related:
Vudu lines up studios to provide HD content [Engadget HD]