Farewell, Vudu, and welcome…Fandango at Home?
No, Fandango hasn’t killed the Vudu on-demand streaming service, but it announced Thursday that it will rebrand it as Fandango at Home, a move that erases one of the oldest brand names in the streaming market.
In an email to registered users, the soon-to-not-be Vudu said the name change would happen in a “few weeks,” while promising that streaming libraries would “stay right where [they’ve] always been.”
But while Vudu isn’t technically dead, it’s a shame to see Fandango deep-six the Vudu brand name, which has been associated with streaming since the very beginning.
Fandango, the massive movie ticketing service that’s jointly owned by NBCUniversal and Warners, snapped up Vudu from Walmart back in 2020, and by 2021 it had merged Vudu with its own on-demand streaming service, FandangoNOW. At around the same time, Vudu became the video storefront for Roku.
But before its acquisition by Walmart in 2010, Vudu was one of the streaming video pioneers, putting out its first streaming device, the Vudu Box, back in 2007, right around the time the original Apple TV arrived. (Netflix began streaming in 2007, too.)
Like the Apple TV, the Vudu Box was a bulky TV set-top box with a big spinning hard drive inside (well, 250GB qualified as “big” back in 2007).
Of course, the biggest obstacle to streaming video back in those days wasn’t so much storage as bandwidth. “Instant” streaming wasn’t a thing yet. You usually had to wait a few minutes before, say, your Apple TV or your Xbox 360 (which could also stream movies) had buffered enough video for the stream to begin, and that was if you’d selected a standard definition stream. If you wanted HD, your wait could be much longer–and indeed, your best bet was to download your evening HD movie in the morning.
The Vudu Box had an ingenious solution to the bandwidth problem: It automatically pre-downloaded the first 30 seconds or so of the most popular movies at any given time. The result: When you rented or purchased a title and clicked “Play,” it began streaming immediately, with the Vudu Box quietly grabbing the rest of the download as you watched.
Vudu also led the way in terms of picture and audio quality, debuting its HDX-format 1080p streaming format while other services were asking viewers to settle for 720p. And in 2009, Vudu became the first streamer to allow its users to purchase 1080p-quality movies.
But less than a year later, Vudu’s heady hardware ride was over. The company announced at CES 2010 that it was pivoting from hardware to focus on streaming software, and roughly a month after that, Vudu was purchased by Walmart.
Vudu still managed to make the occasional headline after the Walmart acquisition, namely through its digital locker partnerships with (now shuttered) UltraViolet and (later) Movies Anywhere. Vudu also launched a “disc-to-digital” program that allowed you to purchase steeply discounted digital rights to a DVD you owned, provided you scanned it using an optical drive first.
Eventually, Walmart unloaded Vudu on Fandango, with the brand becoming the ticket seller’s video storefront just in time for the pandemic.
Even in its later incarnations, Vudu remained a destination for movie lovers, particularly those concerned about streaming quality. My own Vudu locker is crammed with scores of movies, most of them carried over from the iTunes Store via Movies Anywhere (save for the Paramount and Lionsgate titles, but that’s another story).
Of course, our Vudu digital libraries aren’t going anywhere—except soon, they’ll be Fandango at Home libraries.
Still, I think “Vudu” has a better ring to it.
