What's a guy gotta do to get some HD movie downloads around here? Until recently, there wasn't much you could do. While pirates have been serving up HD films for years now, even before the days of HD DVD and Blu-ray, you've been pretty much out of luck if you were looking for legal HD movie downloads. Finally someone has come along to fix this egregious oversight, as VUDU has now added a limited selection of HD movies you can download to own.

While HD TV downloads are nothing new, and VUDU's been offering streaming HD rentals for a while now, this is the first time you can buy an HD title to watch as many times as you choose. Prices are ranging between $14 and $24 right now, which may be slightly more or a bit less expensive than a comparable Blu-ray; either way, it's just about what you'd expect for an HD movie. The biggest problem with the service right now is its paltry selection. Only around fifty films are available for purchase in HD at the moment, and all of those are titles from smaller studios.

It's really too early to say if this VUDU project is a good idea for building an HD movie library. Sure, VUDU players can be had for as little as $150 now, and there's a big appeal to being able to buy, download, and start watching a film straight away, but we have our reservations. It seems to us that a downloaded copy of a film, cutting out the distribution and retail costs a physical disc of the film would suffer, and limited by the inability to carry it with you and watch it on anyone's player, should cost much less than a Blu-ray disc. We were able to find Blu-ray copies of some of the bigger-name HD films VUDU is offering for under $12 on Amazon. Maybe if VUDU could cut its prices in half or add some sort of value to the downloads, like making them available for top Hollywood films before the Blu-ray releases, it'd be more appealing. For now, though, it seems like you're just paying too much for the convenience of not having to wait a few days for a disc to arrive in the mail.

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