The New York Times today runs a story on a pretty exciting company that is playing to revolutionize the movie business. It’s no secret that the movie-going experience has been declining, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, ran by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. Theoretically that enables the movie studios to make the movie securely available to the viewers on the day of the release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others:
DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.