New York Times: Vudu provides instant delivery of thousands of movies, and some can be rented the same day they are released on DVD.

Mr. Hollywood looks up and says, “I did.”

Granted, that joke isn’t ha-ha funny. All right, it’s not funny at all. But what a great metaphor for the downloadable movie business, eh?

These days, anyone born after 1980 expects instant delivery of entertainment. But the Internet movie scene is still dismal: the movies are overpriced, heavily copy protected and lacking subtitles, commentaries or extras. The selection is thin. And even if you go to the trouble of downloading, each movie deletes itself 24 hours after you start playback.

This is not how you win over movie lovers’ hearts, especially when free, unencumbered alternatives like BitTorrent are one click away.

Into this landscape comes the Vudu movie box ($300), which, even a year after its debut, hardly anyone has ever heard of. It’s a small, black set-top box that offers instant playback of 10,000 movies and TV shows. (The first 30 seconds of each are on the hard drive; as you start watching, the rest downloads in the background.) The four-button remote control has an ingenious clickable scroll wheel like the one on a computer mouse.

So why hasn’t the Vudu become more of a hit? You know, apart from the fact that there’s been no advertising?

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