My Top 3 Movie Boxes (Part Two)

APPLE TV is the most recognized brand of the current movie boxes available today, but for some movie lovers, this box may not necessarily be the best option. The nice thing about Apple TV is that if you are an iTunes user, you already know how to use this box as it uses iTunes to manage your content.

From your television you can now enjoy your music, videos, movies, and pictures stored on your computers (PCs or MACs) or music, movies, and TV programming purchased on-the-fly from the Apple Store. To set this up, you simply follow the steps provided by their menu wizard, which walks you through the configuration so that your Apple TV box has a connection to content on your computers or from the Apple Store. After that, you will be able to access any PC stored music, videos, movies and pictures, to view them via your Apple TV, on the connected TV or projector. Setup was really a breeze.

The Apple TV is very small and has awesome onscreen eye-candy, which makes the selection of movies and music an even more entertaining experience. It outputs Composite Video, S-video and analog and digital audio, and for your more discrete movie watchers, Component Video, HDMI audio/video, and Digital Audio. Its video resolutions go up to 1080i for HD and the quality is good. Control is accomplished through their IR remote, which ships with the product. It’s remote control is very small, so one problem is losing it between the sofa cushions. It is very easy to use, just like an iPod. You can also control it though third-party remote controls. I control my Apple TV box via my NetStreams graphic user interface on my wireless controller or touch screens, using IR commands learned from its remote control.

One unique feature of the Apple TV box is that it lets you pick from, and watch, your favorite YouTube videos too; although I will say that when watching these videos on a display greater than 21”, the picture is not so hot and sometimes terrible. The reason for this is the low resolution that the videos are stored in on the Internet. The small file size is great for storage and retrieval online, but offers a less-than-desirable watching experience on displays larger than your computer monitor. In any case, it is a fun feature.

Although this is a very nice product, my big issues with the Apple TV box are: 1) that they only currently offer 1,000 movies for rent or purchase; far behind its competitors. I am not sure why this is, but Apple needs to put the pedal-to-the-metal and at least catch up to its competitors. And 2) that even though they claim to offer HD movies, which you pay more for, the best movie quality I experienced is equivalent to an up-converted Standard Definition DVD, and not a high definition equivalent anywhere near the quality of a Blu-ray movie, as VUDU offers.

Movie prices range from $0.99 to $4.99, TV programs are $1.99, and to rent the entire season varies from $9.99 to $34.99. The list price for the Apple TV box is $229 for their 40GB version and $329 for the 160GB. Apple charges no monthly fees.

VUDU is a great movie box and my favorite of all of the boxes offered in the market today. Like the Apple TV, the VUDU box is compact and can be installed just about anywhere. It is a fairly small box, just like the Apple TV. Its remote control is the best design I have seen to-date; very sexy design indeed. It is designed with the curves of a Porsche and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. A thumb wheel lets you fly around the interface and selections very fast. Aside from the thumb wheel, there are only three other buttons on the remote control, so it makes it super easy to use.

One of the pros of the VUDU remote is that it is RF (radio frequency), which means that if your VUDU box is located inside of a cabinet, it is not a problem. No line-of-sight is needed and it has a very fast response, allowing you to fly through selections faster than you can read them. The con of the VUDU RF remote is that the commands cannot be learned by a universal remote control, because it does not output IR (infrared). There is now an option though, and that is to buy the optional IR dongle from VUDU. In my opinion, this was a major oversight and IR should have been built-into the box, along with its RF, which was a great idea. I control my VUDU from any room in the house using NetStreams DigiLinX user interface from my touch screens, wireless controllers, or computers.

VUDU makes two versions of their box; one for consumers and one that they sell to professional installers. The pro version, VUDU XL, has a lot more memory, ships with the IR dongle, and can be controlled via TCP-IP commands over the home network. All other features are the same. Vudu recently announced a rack-mount box (VUDU XL II).

VUDU’s user interface is every bit as nice at the Apple TV’s user interface, and I find their organization of selections a lot better. A couple of features that they don’t offer at this time is the access to YouTube, which for me is not a big deal, and access to pictures for viewing on a TV. The latter is a great feature for parties, viewing vacations and much more.

VUDU currently offers over 11,000 movies available for rent and/or purchase and this number is growing fast every month. Where VUDU rises far above the other is in their performance. Not only do they store all of the previews for the movies offered, in the box for instant viewing with no downloading time, but once you select a movie to watch, for most folks, it begins to play instantly if you have a 4mbps connection or faster. Where the connection is slower, it can take up to several minutes to download enough of the movie where it will play, but once you start the movie, the download continues in the background with no interruption to your movie experience.

VUDU is currently the only movie box company that offers a HD 1080p in both Component and HDMI output. Movies are available in SD (standard definition), HD (high definition), and HDX (high definition extreme). VUDU is the only on-demand movie provider that offers movies in 1080p, at twice the resolution of any other streaming movie provider. HD and HDX movies are both rented/sold at the same price, but HD is available instantly with a 4mb or faster Internet connection, while HDX can take up to several hours to load. When we know what movie we want to watch that evening, downloading it over several hours is not a problem. However, if we select our movie in real-time, HD still looks great and much better than a movie in standard definition. HDX looks so good, that the average person won’t be able to tell the difference between it and a Blu-ray movie. It is even more impressive on large TVs or movie theaters, because the video artifacts that you would expect to see with a highly compressed movie, are not there. The high definition audio provided with the HDX movies is the best I have heard from a movie box, and VUDU claims that it is 40% higher bit-rate than surround sound DVDs.

Movie prices range from $0.99 to $5.99, TV programs range from $0.50 to $1.99, and to rent the entire season varies from $9.99 to $34.99. The list price for the VUDU box is $299 for their ‘Standard’ VUDU box, which stores about 50 SD movies, and $999 for the XL box, which stores 500 SD movies, but this box is only available through integrators. VUDU charges no monthly fees.

Netflix is a company to watch, mainly because they have been the leaders in the movie-by-mail with over 8 million subscribers, and they have 100,000 movies in their rental library. However; currently they aren’t licensed by the studios to rent most of their movies online, but I am sure that this will change over time. They claim to have over 12,000 movies and TV episodes to stream instantly online. The interesting thing about Netflix, which excites most avid movie watchers, is that Netflix is subscription based. The subscription you select determines how many movies per month you can order, but at least for now, the online movies are offered in an ‘all you can watch’ buffet, for all of the subscriptions, except for the entry level subscription. I anticipate that over time, other movie boxes will add a subscription based model to their offerings, because it makes a lot more sense.

The current Netflix movie box is made by Roku. Like Apple TV and VUDU, this box is small and light. A big downside of this box, for me, was to discover that it only does 480p and does not offer HD video at all. Roku has announced that they plan to offer HD by the end of the year, so I will report on that at another time. If you are one of those consumers that owns an HDTV or projector, and looking for great quality video (at least DVD quality), then you should consider one of the other three boxes. I would say that the video quality from the Roku/Netflix box is worse than that of a DVD, because it is highly compressed, but for some movie watchers, this is acceptable.

The Roku/Netflix box is controlled via an IR remote control. I also control it with my DigiLinX touch screens and web pages, because the NetStreams DigiLinX IP video encoder has an IR output for control. I found their on screen interface to be simple, but boring. It needs to step up a lot in the ‘eye-candy’ department, like Apple TV and VUDU.

My biggest issue with the Roku/Netflix box is that it is not for the common person. You have to be a computer user to use this box, otherwise you have no way to load the movies you want to watch, into the box. In order to watch a movie on this box, you have to select it online. Unlike VUDU and Apple TV, you can’t watch previews on your TV and select the movie. Once you decide what to watch, it is not an instant experience. You have to wait for the movie to download and depending on your connection speed, this can take a while.

Netflix now offers their movies on the Xbox 360 platform – in HD, and soon will offer them on TiVo boxes too. If you have a Microsoft Media Center PC, there is a plug-in available for you too that will let you watch Netflix movies on those platforms too.

My Conclusion

Here is how I stack up the three boxes stack up the three movie boxes:

• Roku/Netflix box: Good


• Apple TV box: Better


• VUDU box: Best

There are other service providers/players coming into the market soon. One notable one to watch also is Blockbuster, which recently purchased MovieLink, a movie-on-demand service provider. In my opinion, movie providers like Blockbuster and Netflix have the advantage with the masses, if, and only if they execute well. This would require them to focus on being the movie provider and let the hardware providers offer the player (the Microsoft strategy with PC providers). It looks like Netflix is well on its way of becoming exactly that. Blockbuster should do the same.

Apple will probably do their own thing with the Apple TV box and iTunes, but they won’t win as big here as they did in the portable music player market, because there are other super powers already in play in this market, with significant bases of subscribers/customers.

VUDU has the upper hand right now in performance and can keep that lead if they focus their resources on technology advancements, the high-end market, and selling to system integrators. They made some significant progress there this month by offering a rack mount movie player, which integrators will love. VUDU may eventually have to open up their platforms to Netflix streams and potentially Blockbuster streams too as customers will want multiple service providers. They could then up-sell those customer bases to their incredible HDX movies over time. If they stay in a high-end niche only, offering the best performance available, they could dominate that sector. If they instead choose to be a movie service provider, they will have to offer their VUDU streams to the box/player manufacturers.

Herman Cárdenas

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com