The Past slips into the past

I had something like 25 days to watch Asghar Farhadi's The Past on Vudu, yet the deadline passed yesterday without me doing so.

Why?

Because Vudu has beaten Hola.

I haven't talked about it much, but Hola is like my magic key to appreciating all the joys of U.S.-based web entertainment, but without actually being in the U.S. Many websites, Netflix chief among them, try to block you if you attempt to access their services in territories where they do not operate -- Australia being one of them.

That's where Hola comes in.

It's an unblocker, which means that with this free little piece of software installed on your computer, a bunch of different websites -- including those for all the major U.S. television networks -- think that your computer is residing in the United States. Pretty handy. It's the only reason we've been able to keep our Netflix service after moving. (Netflix is due in Australia in the near future, but even then it will be a severely truncated version of the extensive catalogue of titles enjoyed in the U.S.)

However, Vudu is somehow Hola-resistant. Oh, it appears that it will work. When you enable Hola, the error message changes from Vudu not being available in this part of the world, to just not being able to connect to the server. But in neither case am I watching the next movie from the director of my favorite film of 2011, A Separation.

I wouldn't even have been in this situation except that Vudu was trying to get me to become a more active user, and offered me a $5 credit toward anything on the site. I successfully applied my credit to The Past. I did not, however, successfully watch it.

And why does this matter? It's just another movie of many that I haven't seen yet.

Well, they talked about The Past on a podcast I listen to, Filmspotting: Streaming Video Unit, over a month ago. And though I don't usually go to these lengths, I've been saving that episode (and therefore, all subsequent episodes) to listen to until I've seen it. (I have to go in order on podcasts, you see.) Given that I had this Vudu credit, I thought this would be easy enough to do.

But no -- Vudu wants me to be a customer, but only on their terms.

I feel like it's an antiquated model in this day and age, when the customer is even more always right than he/she used to be always right. You can buy something from Bed Bath & Beyond, grind it to dust in your blender, and return it for a full refund. As long as the box weighs the same amount, they won't even look inside. They'll just fork over the money.

So why does Vudu care so much whether I'm spending money on their service in the U.S. or Australia?

There's probably a legitimate answer to this, but I don't know what it is.

I understand that you can actually watch Vudu abroad if you are willing to invest in a VPN. And you can do this for fairly cheaply. But any cost at all kind of defeats my Vudu credit, doesn't it? Especially since there's no regular need for me to watch anything on Vudu, so the cost of the VPN would go entirely to a limited number of Vudu viewings.

Now I know the reason the only time I've watched something on Vudu was that time I randomly bought Mississippi Burning in early 2013. I couldn't get it from Netflix, you see, and I had to watch it for a project I was working on.

So now it's not only The Past that's in the past, but my interest in being a customer of Vudu.

You win, Vudu.

If you want to call a business-negative outcome a win.

The Vudu that you do

So well, it makes me want to shoop shoop shoop.

I've heard of this streaming service called Vudu primarily from listening to the Filmspotting: SVU (Streaming Video Unit) podcast, in which it's frequently mentioned as one of the places you can get such-and-such a film online. But like some of the other names of streaming services I don't recognize (Crackle), I didn't know what distinguished it or how it worked, and I kind of assumed there would be something difficult about -- some obstacle that left me disinclined to try it.

And I probably -- definitely -- wouldn't have tried it if Netflix carried Mississippi Burning. See, I'm watching Alan Parker's 1988 film as part of a project I'm doing for another blog, but the bright green Save button on Netflix left me scratching my head about how I'd get it to my eyeballs.

Then I remembered the handy website www.canistream.it, which allows you to type in any movie name and get an immediate report about where the movie is available for streaming. Vudu came up when I searched for Mississippi Burning.

"How hard can it be?"

Not very, it turns out, but it did come with an annoying marketing red herring.

See, when I went to the Vudu website, I was met with an advert telling me that I'd get ten free movies when I signed up for the service. Since signing up for the service is free, I thought they must be really desperate to get people to use it. It seemed too good to be true, but I dove in and signed up as quickly as I could.

On the Mississippi Burning page, I saw that I could rent it in any of three formats: Standard for $2.99, HD for $3.99 and something called HDX (I don't know what that is, and I can't be bothered to look it up) for $4.99. I had entered my credit card number as part of the signup, and I expected there to be some indication that I could use one of my ten free movies to buy Mississippi Burning. When that clearly wasn't happening, I decided to go to the help section.

At which point I determined that it's not any ten movies, it's a specific package of ten. They could have teased me one step further by having them be ten downright awful movies, but they're really not. The biggest problem with these ten movies is that I've already seen most of them: Behind Enemy Lines, Ghost, Lethal Weapon, Never Been Kissed, Paranormal Activity, The Perfect Storm, The Producers (2005), Psycho (1998), Valentine's Day and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. Of the three I haven't seen (Behind Enemy Lines, Psycho and Wrong Turn 2), it's possible I will eventually watch use Vudu to watch Psycho, but I won't be prioritizing it any time soon. I'm told that these movies change, so if you sign up for Vudu three weeks from now, you may get something different.

The real advantage Vudu has in terms of my own setup is that I can watch it easily on either of our TVs. We have an LG BluRay player in our living room and our bedroom, and both have Vudu as option. That's no given, since I think Netflix may be the only other service that appears on both players. So it worked quite nicely to fire up Mississippi Burning on Wednesday night in our bedroom, and as a measure of how gripping I found it, I didn't start to fall asleep until the very end of the two-plus-hour movie, and only then because it was approaching 11. (The comfort of the bed usually knocks me out much earlier than that. In fact, last night, I fell asleep during the opening credits of the TV show I was trying to watch.)

Verdict on Vudu? Now that I've done the "hard part" of signing up, I will definitely use it again. Sure, my first option will always be Netflix streaming, because I get that free as part of our monthly subscription. But it's refreshing to know that the streaming universe doesn't begin and end with Netflix. As I've found more and more holes in the Netflix catalogue the more I look, it's nice to know that there are other reasonably priced services out there that can fill those holes.

Next week: I see what the deal is with Crackle, because that's the only way I can watch Ishtar, the first movie in my Famous Flops series.