Vudu HD Movies come to Boxee!

Thats right, Boxee does it again!  Today, the Boxee Blog announced that they are adding Vudu's huge collection of on-demand, new release movie titles to Boxee users on Mac, PC, and the forthcoming Boxee Box (amazon.com preorders set to ship Nov 10th)


New Vudu users who signup via Boxee will even get a free movie to try it out.  Count me in.

Movies are $2.00 each for a 2 night rental.  Combine this with the huge library of free content already available, and NetFlix streaming titles at $9.00 per month and you've got better-than-cable choices for a fraction of the cost.

Users of the free Boxee software on PC and Mac will only get SD, but with the Boxee Box, users can get up to 1080p in Dolby Digital 5.1 (depending on your bandwidth):

• SD (480p) requires 1 Mbps
• HD (720p) requires 2.25 Mbps
• HDX (1080p) requires 4.5 Mbps

I know what I'm doing this weekend -- signing up for Vudu and watching a free movie on Boxee!

New AppleTV Ships (Thanks, but no thanks)

I'm actually surprised at the small number of folks bragging and tweeting about their AppleTV's arriving late this week.

It has started shipping and folks have started unwrapping them, but the most exciting news seems to be that you can backup the Apple SHSH with TinyUmbrella (the tool that allows you to revert back to an older iOS firmware after Apple stops officially allowing you to do so).  This probably means the device will eventually be jailbroken, and at that point, it may have some interesting and useful purpose to me.

Why "Thanks, but no thanks"?  For starters, the closed ecosystem of the device.  You can stream your local content to it, however, the only other source of content is Netflix and the iTunes store (for $0.99 per show or $3.99 per movie).

Sure, $99 is cheap, but it I had to pay a buck every time my kids watched a SpongeBob episode I'd be broke!  Why would I do that, when the content I want to stream is already available for free (as advertiser supported content) over at Hulu and other similar sites.  No streaming of NHL GameCenter Live + no MBL.com + no Hulu = no thanks (for me).

Maybe as a jailbroken device it will have a better justification for a place in my entertainment system.

Let us know what you think:

Can AppleTV do anything that we can't already do?
Does it do any of it better?