Vudu.com now offers its cable box for $150, down from $300. According to Vudu Executive VP of Strategy Edward Lichty, the company has slashed prices because they're doing so well, and not because the economy is doing so bad.
"We are reaping the rewards of success in the retail channel over the holidays, lower component prices and higher movie revenues," he saud. "The combination of these factors has enabled us to lower the price of VUDU and bring it within reach of more consumers."
Not everyone's buying the Pollyanna story, though. Just ask tech pundit Wilson Rothman.
"In the past half year, the company has gone through two rounds of layoffs, and the remaining warm bodies are focused on a third-party software for existing devices like, hopefully, Xbox 360 and other consoles," he wrote for Gizmodo.com. "This is probably what they should have been building in the first place. So when we hear there's a sale, we don't think 'success' —we think 'going out of business.'"
The failure of Vudu would be a setback for the adult industry. The size of the setback is debatable, but the fact remains that Vudu combined mainstream and adult entertainment in one set-top box. The Vudu box's adult offerings included titles from high-profile companies like Vivid and Wicked, all delivered through a channel named for industry trade paper Adult Video News.
Industry experts touched on the importance of an integrated set-top box at the 2009 XBIZ Conference, where panelists in one seminar agreed that consumers want a single gizmo that they can plug into their TVs and instantly get all kinds of entertainment, including adult.
"It's a tough thing to get people to put another box on their TV," said Michael Klein of Hustler. "Companies should still offer a mixture of other products, and it might be a better idea to get porn in with other IPTV deals. I mean, are people going to say, 'Welcome to my house. This is my porn box'?"
For more information, visit Vudu.com.
