Met with the VUDU team at Digital Experience last night and got a look at a new VUDU box that was just announced. The new box will have 1TB of storage built in (as opposed to 250GB in the original VUDU) and provide an IR remote. The current unit doesn’t support IR, so you can’t add it to a universal remote.

The new box will retail for $999 which is definitely steep. However, if you consider that the original box is $400, you *could* consider 4 times the storage for a little more than double the price a bargain 🙂

I also asked VUDU about what happens if someone fills up the current 250GB drive with purchased movies. Rumors in the VUDU forums said that VUDU would soon release a software update to allow you to delete movies you’ve purchased (to conserve space) and then re-download them to watch them again.  Unfortunately, I was told that there is no such patch coming and was pointed to the new 1TB box as an option to overcome that problem.

Of course, buying a $999 box to get better control of the content on your $400 box isn’t really an option. Hopefully they’ll listen to their customers and offer content management tools soon.