I was reminded of the VUDU service today.  VUDU is a streaming service that lets you rent or buy movies and TV shows and streams them to you.  They started out life as a dedicated box you would purchase that had a portion of the movies on their service cached on the internal hard drive.  The movie would start right away and then stream from there.  Nowadays they are strictly a software company.  On your computer you can rent movies for $2 and have access to them for 2 days.  Good deal.

And here’s the best part.  According to their website, you can get movies the same day that they are released on DVD.  No more 28 day Netflix penalty.

And here’s the worst part.  Television shows.  The catalog of available television shows, especially children and family programming is anemic at best.

VUDU is built into numerous web connected devices , Blu-ray players, HDTVs, and the PS3.

So, this seems like a killer combo for streaming content:  Netflix Streaming – $7.99/Mo. and VUDU for new DVD release access, a-la-carte pricing.  I just need a way to get VUDU content on my TV.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see a VUDU channel on my Roku.