Vudu

» see vudu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

vudu never reached turkey. it was a walmart project, a us-only rental service, the kind of streaming layer you only learned about by reading american tech coverage. in turkey through the 2010s the rental and download market was tiny, pretty much itunes movies plus whatever was on the local turkcell or vodafone bundles. vudu was the second-tier american equivalent of itunes movies, the one you saw at the bottom of the smart tv home screen but never opened.

vudu inc was founded in 2004 in santa clara by tony miranz and alain rossmann. the original product was hardware, the vudu box, a black settop unit with an ethernet jack and a hard drive. it shipped in september '07 at usd three hundred ninety nine and a smaller version in early '08. the box was a peer-to-peer streaming device that would predownload chunks of any film in the catalog onto every other vudu box on the network so that any rental started instantly.

the hardware side did not catch on. by '09 the company was running out of money and pivoting toward licensing the vudu software stack onto third-party hardware. the deal that saved it was with lg and samsung to put a vudu app on smart tvs. walmart announced the acquisition on february 22 '10 and closed the deal a few weeks later. the box was discontinued, the brand became a pure software rental store.

the walmart years were the long peak. through the 2010s vudu was the default rental and purchase layer on basically every smart tv sold in the us, every xbox and playstation, every roku and chromecast and amazon device. the model was rental at a few dollars per night or purchase at around ten to twenty dollars, with a free ad-supported tier called movies on us that launched in '16. it was the largest non-itunes electronic-sell-through service in the us by transaction volume for several years.

walmart sold vudu to fandango media on july 6 '20. fandango at the time was a joint venture between nbcuniversal and warner bros, the move folded vudu into the fandango brand that ran the ticket-sales side of the same business. the vudu brand was kept alive for another four years before being retired on march 12 '24 as the service was renamed fandango at home.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the box that did not catch on ~

the original vudu box was the part that nobody remembers. it was a small black hardware unit with a remote control, an ethernet jack, a sata hard drive, and an hdmi out. the rfp tony miranz pitched in '04 was for a peer-to-peer streaming system that would put a partial copy of every film in the catalog onto every box on the network. when you hit play on a rental the first few chunks would come off your own disk, the rest would stream in from other boxes nearby. the latency-to-first-frame was effectively zero, which was the pitch.

this part i was not around for. anyway, the catalog at launch in september '07 was around five thousand films, much smaller than itunes movies which had launched a year earlier. the box itself was usd three hundred ninety nine and the cheaper version was two hundred ninety nine, in a market where the apple tv was also around three hundred dollars and netflix dvds were two dollars a night by mail. the value proposition was thin. by '09 the company was pivoting to a software licensing model and the box product was effectively dead at the point walmart acquired the company a year later.

~ the walmart years ~

anyway, walmart kept vudu running as a digital media store. there was a stretch around 2014 to 2018 when vudu was the secondary rental layer everyone fell back to when the title they wanted was not on netflix. ultra hd 4k support came in '16, dolby atmos audio in '17. the brand had a small but loyal install base of people who bought films digitally and wanted them in a non-apple non-amazon ecosystem.

the bundle that mattered was disc-to-digital. walmart had set up a deal in '12 where you could bring a physical dvd or blu-ray into any walmart store and get a digital copy added to your vudu library for a small fee. that promotion ran for about eight years and was the part of the service that distinguished it from competitors. the movies anywhere service that launched in '17 (the disney-amazon-google-apple-vudu cross-library locker) made the disc-to-digital flow technically interoperable across stores, which was the right outcome for users and probably also the moment vudu's brand-loyalty advantage started to dissolve.

~ the postmortem ~

walmart sold vudu to fandango on july 6 '20. fandango was the ticketing arm of nbcuniversal and warner bros, the move folded vudu into the same business that ran the movie-ticket purchase flow for chain theaters. the vudu brand kept running for almost four more years under fandango ownership, mostly because retiring it would have meant pushing every existing user through a brand-rename flow on every device.

the rebrand was announced on february 16 '24 and took effect on march 12 '24. the service became fandango at home across the smart-tv install base and on the mobile apps at the same time. the catalog and the user accounts carried over, the visual identity flipped from the vudu blue-and-orange to the fandango red. the vudu domain redirects to fandangoathome.com in 2026. the brand that walmart had spent fourteen years on as the second-tier digital store is gone, the underlying service is the same software running under a different name.

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