FiOS HD Video On Demand silently launching in select markets

As I mentioned back in my February post about VOD, I've been waiting for some HD goodness. It now looks like cravings will be satisfied.

While channel surfing last night, I came across a Verizon FiOS commercial that was touting HD VOD. I pulled up the VOD menu, and sure enough, there it was: "High Definition" was one of the options under "Browse".

My experience apparently isn't an accident or an anomaly. Broadband Reports has unconfirmed reports of HD VOD launces in Texas, California, Maryland, Northern NJ, and Philadelphia/Delaware. I can add Northern Virginia to that unofficial list. We'll expect some official announcement from Verizon later this week.

I didn't have time to play with it too much last night, but here's a quick rundown of what I saw:

• There were two main partitions of HD content: HD Movies and HD Television.
• HD Movies had a decently large selection of revent movies, all of which seemed to be priced at $5.99. I haven't gotten a chance to gauge the picture quality yet, but I'm still holding to my view that this is too pricey.
• HD Television had sub-menus for about 4 CBS shows (including Jericho, maybe a CSI or two?) and a whole bunch of other content that didn't interest me in the least.

I'll need to investigate a bit more later this week when I have some time.