Voddler - Ambitious but disappointing

I was pleasantly surprised when a Voddler invitation arrived to my inbox. After trying it out I had some mixed feelings about the service and decided to write this review. Voddler is a commercial VOD (video-on-demand) service (still in beta) with a similar concept as Spotify, but with the difference that Spotify does music while Voddler does movies/video.

After a short registration process I was given the opportunity to download the client. Sadly there were only versions for Windows and OSX. The installation went smoothly with the 15.5MB windows installer, but I found it bit annoying that during the installation process the installer started to download an additional 15MB package, apparently it was the Adobe AIR installer. The only way to start the player is by choosing a movie from the Voddler webpage, this even if the player is installed locally and the movies are cached on disk.

Sadly this is the point where things start to go downhill.

At the time of writing there were only 45 movies available, 20 free and the rest 25 costing between 2 to 4 euros. I understand that Voddler is still in beta, but this is a huge problem. People have more then 45 DVD:s at home and this is supposed to be a VOD service. It will also be interesting to know if the users are actually willing to pay for the movies or just watch the free ones. I doubt that the current model will work. To succeed Voddler needs to make all the content free, sponsored with commercials, and to have a premium service with a (monthly) subscription fee, just like Spotify.

It's interesting that the Voddler front page has an ad that state they have both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 available, well I didn't find them. I chose to watch, a for me totally unknown movie as most of them were, Wolfhound.

Besides the company related information the Voddler web pages only contain the content list and the possibility to edit your user account. This is good because it is all that is really needed. Please keep it that way. The user account page includes the payment settings to pay for content with credit cards. The web pages work fine except for some strange lag/glitch in the movie list filtering (Premium/Free checkboxes).

The player itself seemed to work surprisingly well. The UI was clean and simplistic. Jumping to an arbitrary location was slow by this was not Voddlers fault (see below). Stopping the player and then restarting it, made the player ask me if I wish to resume from the previous location, how nice of it. The player defaults to full-screen, but works in windowed mode too. Subtitles work and the language can be changed during playback. The player includes the ability to play video at a lower resolution, this is useful on slower hardware.

Sadly my slow Intel Atom N280 based laptop and slow internet connection made the movie unwatchable. This because of lots of lagging and buffering, but that is definitely not Voddlers fault. Also to be honest, the movie seemed quite boring.

Voddler doesn't seem technically too bad (except for the missing Linux client), but they need content, content and more content.

So, just to summarize, Voddler - Ambitious but disappointing.