Forbes: "Bad Vudu" Sopping Up Bandwidth

An interesting take on "Bad Vudu" from Lee Gomes at Forbes. He's concerned that Vudu is sopping up bandwidth with the peer-to-peer system it uses to deliver movies. That means somebody watching Iron Man might be getting pieces of the movie from your Vudu.

Gomes concedes he hasn't noticed any network slowdown. But he complains it should be clear to buyers how Vudu operates before they spend $300 on its box. He has a point. Gomes is tech savvy, and if he didn't understand, then most people wouldn't -- and they should.

For the record, Vudu's CTO weighed in with a comment on Gomes' article:

1. Vudu's usage of upstream bandwidth is capped at a value designed to not interfere with other in-home activities.

2. Vudu dynamically auto-detects other use of upstream bandwidth and throttles itself down in those cases.

3. The user can manually throttle down Vudu bandwidth usage in the Settings page to throttle down upstream usage if they aren't happy with their network performance.

4. Bandwidth usage per user actually declines as the Vudu network gets larger, so there's no reason to be concerned that things are ok now but will get worse over time. (If anything, available upstream bandwidth will go up