For the last two years I’ve been following Vudu, the Santa Clara, Calif., based start-up entirely focused on bringing a large on-demand catalog of movies from the Web into the living room. The company started out in the tough business of selling its own set-top box, then gradually began integrating its well-reviewed service into televisions and Blu-ray players.
At the Consumer Electronics Show Wednesday, Vudu is announcing that it is widely expanding that effort. The company has inked deals with Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba and is deepening its current deals with LG Electronics, Mitsubishi and Vizio to push Vudu farther into their product lines.
That essentially puts the Vudu streaming movie service into the products of every major television maker except for Sony and Panasonic and Vudu says it’s talking to both of those companies as well.
“This is going to give us a really meaningfully big footprint,” said Edward Lichty, an executive vice president at Vudu. “We are going to be in millions of devices by end of 2010 and tens of millions by 2011.”
TV makers are rushing to embrace these Internet movie services like Netflix’s
Watch Instantly, Amazon’s Video
on Demand service, Blockbuster OnDemand
and Roxio’s Cinema Now. They give consumers more reasons to buy pricey Internet-enabled televisions, and in many cases manufacturers get a cut of the revenues generated when consumers make purchase from their
televisions.
Vudu is also following companies such as Yahoo, Roku and Boxee in introducing
Vudu Apps, a platform for delivering other Internet services to the television.
Widgets on the new Vudu platform will include music site Pandora, photo sharing site Picassa, a New York Times news service and about 90 other applications. Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba will use Vudu Apps in their products, the company said.