We've obviously put in a request for an interview, but so far the company has said that it won't comment. So let's gather what we've learned so far, then talk about some of the questions this box will have to answer before it can succeed in the market:

Not surprisingly, the company's operated in stealth mode for the last few years. Both the VP of engineering and the chief operating officer are from TiVo. That's a good sign. TiVo's are now the Kleenex of PVRs (probably the best in a market that can make do with cheaper, generic knockoffs) but they invented the category along with ReplayTV, and do many things right.

The Vudu box (Times' guess on price: about $300) uses peer-to-peer technology, caching some of the content on other Vudu boxes. The idea is that this cached "neighbor" content (my word, not theirs) allows the movie or TV show to instantly start playing. Unlike the AppleTV, the content down the pipe is HD, although it's upscaled from MPEG-4. Movies and other content have been licensed from "every major studio -- except, for now, Sony Pictures Entertainment -- and 15 smaller ones."

I've always been interested by products which affect society, such as the cell phone and the DVR, or TiVo. Video on demand has been around for years, but it's been restricted to just a few movies and events. This has the potential of pushing this market forward into the mainstream.

To do so, however, Vudu needs to solve several problems:

• Upstream bandwidth, provider level: The monkey on this technology's back. As we've reported on previously, Comcast and others have "floating," undisclosed bandwidth caps as part of their Acceptable Use Policies. This basically means that unless you've downloaded a download meter to track your utilized bandwidth, and troll through the Web to find anecdotal reports of how many gigabytes of throughput got a particular user banned, you'll always live in fear that your licensed, absolutely authorized use of broadband will end up terminating your ISP account. That's not Vudu's problem, that's the ISP's problem. But it is a problem, and a big one.

• Upstream bandwidth, user level: Anyone who has ever used peer-to-peer applications (or even tried to email a large attachment) knows that the download bandwidth far outstrips the upstream bandwidth. More to the point, performing either activity monopolizes your Internet bandwidth, to the point that VOIP applications become garbled, and surfing the Web is noticeably slower.

  Under this model, we can speculate that a portion of the upstream bandwidth (all of it?) will (probably) always be dedicated to streaming movies, not only impacting your usage allowance (see above) but impacting your other services. As a commenter on Slashdot pointed out, demand for quality-of-service (QoS) routers could spike. The comment, "Vudu sucks -- when it's on, you can't do anything else" will kill this, fast.

• Price: Another question mark. A box price of $300 or so isn't a problem, although consumers used to subsidized DVRs (and thus a single set-top box) might balk. Per-movie pricing and availability is going to be another big question. Do consumers view watching a movie at home as a premium experience, or as a lower-priced alternative to the movie theater? And if the theaters continue holding movies for digital VOD/DVD/Vudu release until after a window of a few months, is there still a premium?

• The high-def dilemma: AppleTV lacks high-def, and it's taken heat for it. Vudu upscales its video into high-def from an MPEG-4 source. To what resolution? Another big question, and one that will definitely have an impact on the price, as well as determining the quality of the experience.

• Ownership: Last but not least, will consumers be granted any rights to the content? A downloaded movie apparently won't be stored on the box; will consumers nevertheless "own" the content, to be reviewed as they wish? Anyone who has watched children devour their favorite movie or TV show over and over will understand. And if a viewer doesn't own this content, what will prevent the studios from instituting "subscriptions" to a particular movie, or forcing consumers to pay again and again for a particular piece of content? This is perhaps the most fundamental question of all, and one that will have to be answered (or spun) satisfactorily to satisfy not just the American consumer, but the American geek.