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Wal-Mart Closes Online Movie Download Service
Posted by
Zonk
on Friday December 28, @01:34PM
from the hard-to-fight-the-flix dept.
from the hard-to-fight-the-flix dept.
eldavojohn writes "A year after opening its movie download service, Wal-Mart has abandoned the endeavor. They claim this is a result of HP's decision to stop supporting its video download store software. The article also notes that, unlike iTunes, Wal-Mart offered variable pricing which attracted a lot of studios. 'The world's largest retailer instead turned its rental service over to Netflix Inc. Wal-Mart still operates a music download service and continues to sell CDs and DVDs at retail stores and over the Internet for shipping by mail.' Is this evidence of the strength of unified pricing in media downloads or just another company being squished by the giant Netflix & Apple?"
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Wal-Mart Closes Online Movie Download Service
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Wal-Mart "squished"? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wal-Mart "squished"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cost and lack of extras the reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cost and lack of extras the reason. (Score:4, Funny)
Squished? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's like saying the local burger joint is going to crush McDonalds! Sure, Netflix is a big company, but they're nothing compared to the Wally-world behemoth.
Re:Squished? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes a big company will try some new endeavor to much fanfare, but not bother to try very hard, assuming somehow that they will win because they are big. When that happens it's easy to take them out. Wal-Mart had no plan here; they just thought selling some videos at terms dictated by the studios might get them some cash. If they ran their retail stores that way, those would fail too, but they put serious effort into their retail stores.
Re:Squished? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate my local Walmart as much as the next guy. And individual stores may be inefficient or suck. But the corporation as a whole is extremely efficient. I work in the trucking industry. Walmart is one of the companies that can afford to spend $1000 on an experimental MPG increaser. Whether it be APUs for the trucks, side skirts for the trailers, single tire rears, etc. If engine company X can provide
They forced use of APUs on ALL trucks after doing a trial run. At a trucking conference they presented their savings broke even at 16 months. Now a ton of other companies are following their lead.
I thought I read on
I don't have a lot of nice things to say about walmart, but that they're inefficient isn't one of them.
Wal-mart does what it does (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wal-mart does what it does (Score:4, Insightful)
I read somewhere that 75% of all KMarts and Sears competed with a Wal-Mart, but only 33% of Wal-Marts competed with a Sears because of this strategy. When you can beat your competitors on price, location, and convenience, you're going to do well no matter what.
Re:Wal-mart does what it does (Score:4, Funny)
It's Walmart (Score:4, Insightful)
HP Dropping support sounds like a cop out... but a believable one
Businesses are NOT swiss army knives (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is evidence of businesses trying to be too many things to too many people and slowly discovering that no, you can't be everything to everyone. "Jack of all trades, master of none" indeed.
Focus on a specific market and DO THAT WELL.
Outside the Core Competency (Score:4, Insightful)
While hindsight is 20/20... this is a classic example of an "Old media" company failing to adapt to the "New Media" because they didn't have any expertise in the current technology.
Wal-Mart's core competency is managing their supply chain. They make money by being the most efficient supplier of products that are in local demand. They operate their integrated technological systems marvelously. They don't know jack-shit about the internet and "download-able content". They should partner with Amazon to run their webpage... though that would probably start to enter into an anti-trust area.
Too many restrictions... (Score:2, Insightful)
All of Wal-Mart's eggs were in HP's basket (Score:4, Insightful)
It's neither (Score:2)
Trying to do a downloadable media store without taking the iPod into account is like trying to market an office productivity suite that doesn't read/write MS Office docs: You're doomed to failure from the start.
If (and this is a BIG if) the movie studios wake up to the benefits of DRM-free downloads like some record labels have, the big winner here could be Amazon.com. They're uniquely positioned to equal, if not better the success that Apple has had. They're platform agnostic (for music, at least), , are known and trusted brand, have a working system for movies in place already (I've found that downloading those free Bugs Bunny cartoons to my TiVo was VERY easy), and have as much juice with the studios as Wal-Mart does.
No contract with HP? (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably had code escrow but... (Score:4, Interesting)
I would bet they did have a code escrow agreement - in the event HP decided to back out of doing the software (which they did) WalMart gets access and use of all the HP source.
The fact that Wal-Mart is shutting down operations shows exactly what use code escrow is - jack and squat. What is WalMart going to do with a bunch of hacked together HP code, without any of the people who worked on it?
Plus in general a problem with code escrow is that you can't look at the source before you take it over to see how feasible that proposition really is.
My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my software.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Walmart fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never buy any kind of application software from Hewlett-Packard! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
Seriously, HP has the worst cace of attention deficit disorder of any company I've ever seen. I've spent 25 years watching them announce "the next big thing" only to completely forget about it a year later after having sold it to three big customers (who are then completely screwed of course). Anyone who buys a proprietary solution from them at this point deserves what they get.
G.
DRM is what kills it for me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sales force (Score:3, Interesting)
However, short-term, DVD is still king. So do they cut into their current sales for an uncertain future (can they really win against the other big-players?
Another possible explanation, is perhaps they realized getting into variable-pricing was a mistake. If history gives us any lessons, the media companies are greedy bastards. They don't seem to give much thought into long-term planning. This is one case where the intelligence of Apple really comes through. They realized that unless they could control the prices, companies would try to charge more money than the physical media costs. I suspect after some grace period, in order to save face, NBC will come back to iTunes.
Bad Summary (Score:2)
The line in TFA about turning over the rental business to Netflix relates to something that happened in 2005. Nothing to do with a download service at all. No squishing involved, on anybody's part.
letting the studios set the variable pricing.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Many studios have resisted signing deals with iTunes in part because of Apple's desire to sell movies at one price. Studios prefer variable pricing such as Wal-Mart offered.
what's to note here is that films were offered between $13 and $20 a pop, with older titles at $7.50. When will it occur to studios, in regards to how variable pricing won't work, that if there is no demand for an "older title," then there will be no purchases, even if you sold them at a buck a pop.
the ones that are in demand, that people want to buy, are being sold at or above the price of a regular dvd! sounds more like the studios are trying to make a download service fail.
Unified pricing is short sighted. (Score:2)
And I have a feeling with CD sales on the decline we're going to see more of the same. Especially compilations that will come in under the 10 USD watermark that will offer more than enough tracks to make it worth getting tracks you don't like for the ones that you do.
But they sure do take returns! (Score:1)
Now try that with Office Max or Office Depot. I have purchased things that didn't work out and when I went to return them, found they only had a 30-day policy -- even with a receipt. WTF?
Until someone has returns policies like Wal-Mart... I'll keep going because I know I can take it back.
Perhaps it's a sign of something else... (Score:2)
Wal-Marts Movie Download Service (Score:1, Interesting)
Nonono you got that wrong (Score:2, Funny)
Like this:
WALMART ONLINE MOVIES SUX0RZ
or if you liked the service
WALMART ONLINE MOVIES SHUTDOWN SUX0RS
See, that wasn't so hard, was it?
Re:The real reason Wal*Mart got out (Score:2)
I would think they could save a lot using Chinese distributors and not he studios to get their files.
Re:The real reason Wal*Mart got out (Score:2)