Hasta La Gadget!

Hulu Plus is cutting its subscription prices from $10 to $8/month, and PS3 users have another way to buy or rent high-def movies with Vudu. ‘Tis the season for internet video, and no streaming service or wired entertainment box will be left without its stocking stuffed.

There’s been speculation about a Hulu Plus price cut for a while. When you’re already paying for cable, Netflix, home internet, Xbox Live Gold, 3G voice and data plans — this list goes on and on — $10 for another monthly subscription is a tough sell when plain-vanilla Hulu is free. The new lower price and availability on a wider range of devices (where, crucially, regular Hulu isn’t available) makes Hulu Plus much more attractive.

The price didn’t drop quite as much as people thought it would — $5/month seems to be the sweet spot for users to say “what the heck, who cares how much I use it” — but Hulu has offered a one-week free trial for new subscribers and a price difference credit to early adopters who ponied up the $10. Not too shabby.

Playstation 3 owners were among the first to get Hulu Plus off their computers and onto their television sets, and now they have its rhyming cousin Vudu too. Vudu is Wal-Mart’s on-demand movie service, offering streaming rentals and purchases in 1080p, perfect for the PS3’s high-end media power (assuming you’ve got 4.5 Mbps internet).

The Vudu app itself is free; movies cost between about $15 to $20 to own and $4 and $6 to rent, depending on format (higher-definition movies with surround sound cost more).

Internet TV has been an amazing space to watch this year, as there’s been a perfect synergy between the services, who want to reach as many people’s television sets as possible, and the device manufacturers, who want to offer as many services to their users as possible. Content makers love it, too. The only people to feel sorry for are the broadband providers — but as they make moves to tier and cap and throttle data usage, they’re quickly adjusting to the new reality as well.

Hulu Plus™ Subscription Service Launches For $7.99 per month [Hulu/Press Release]
VUDU Comes to the PS3, Adding Another Choice for PSN Members to Experience Media Instantly [Playstation Blog]

See Also:

• Take That Dish Network: Hulu Plus Now For Everyone
• Hulu Plus For PlayStation 3, Invitation-Free
• More TV Coming to TiVo and Roku This Fall with Hulu Plus
• Walmart Buys Vudu, Jumping Into Online Movie Rentals
• Vudu Application Brings Remote Rentals to iPhone
• New Vudu Comes on The Scene With a Big Rack

Is it Sony’s play against the Wiimote, or the Kinect… or both? Hard to say exactly, but there’s no question that the PS3 is no longer on the outside looking in when it comes to motion gaming. Now that it’s been on the market for a few months, we’re looking to hear from early adopters — have you enjoyed your time with the Move? Has it lived up to your expectations? Any quirks with gameplay that you’d iron out? Any particular games that you’d prefer to see play nice with the apparatus? Set yourself in the mindset of a SCEA designer for a tick and let us know how you’d do the Move differently down in comments below. And yeah, sticking with “Arc” is totally an acceptable suggestion to make.

How would you change Sony’s PlayStation Move? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We all know Sony likes to be a bit off the wall with its commercials, so this dystopian vision of a grown-up baby’s trudge through corporate monotony shouldn’t surprise us at all. And yet, somehow, it does. It’s part of a pair of new ads destined for Latin America, the second of which awaits you after the break.

Continue reading PlayStation Moves into creepy ad business

PlayStation Moves into creepy ad business originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ll get this out of the way right up front: VGChartz won’t say where it gets its sales figures and, because of that, they’re not to be taken as gospel or treated with much validity on their own. But, comparing one set of the site’s numbers to another can be useful in showing trends, and with that caveat firmly in mind let’s take a look at Microsoft’s Kinect vs. Sony’s PlayStation Move. According to the site, Kinect Adventures (bundled in with the camera itself) sold just under 480,000 units in one week after launching on November 4th, while the PlayStation Move sold 200,000 “units” in its first week, which according to VGChartz is not individual pieces of hardware but bundles of hardware tied to a single console. (This contrasts to Sony’s figure, which counts each piece of hardware — nunchuck, wand, and camera — separately.) So, by these rather early and decidedly unofficial numbers it looks like Microsoft’s Kinect investment might just be paying off, though of course it’s the long-run that counts in these things.

Speculative Kinect sales figures announced, looks to have handily trumped PlayStation Move originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 07:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony’s “it only does everything” claim for the PS3 seems to be growing stronger with every day that passes. After getting Hulu Plus in the US recently, the versatile console has just seen the green light to start some movie streaming action in the UK, courtesy of a hookup with Lovefilm. To get this free extra, you have to have a £5.99 or above monthly Lovefilm subscription (that’s excluding its Games offering), though there’s a limit on how much streaming you can do at that price point. Such stipulations fall by the wayside on the £9.99 top tier, leaving you and your console to enjoy as many movies as you can handle.

Lovefilm movie streaming now live on UK PlayStation 3 consoles originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 07:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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