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Wal-Mart Enters NetFlix's Business
wcbrown writes "AP reports that Wal-Mart is entering into the online DVD rental arena, currently dominated by Netflix. Wal-Mart is starting out with 13,000 titles, six distribution centers, and competitive pricing. With a seriously tremendous infrastructure and expansive will, Wal-Mart stands poised to overtake Netflix. To say the least, that's not going to be good for business."
This isn't necessarily bad for NetFlix. First, it "validates" the market, and gives NetFlix a bunch of free PR (all the articles about the Walmart entering the fray will compare/contrast with NetFlix), including making tens of millions of consumers more aware of this new sort of rental scheme that they just don't grok yet. Second, it makes NetFlix a take-over target for any other company wanting to join in the competition (perhaps even BlockBuster, if their home-grown offering falters). Then again, maybe NetFlix will get blown out of the water.
To say the least, that's not going to be good for business
Competition is good for the consumer.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
Well as we have seen Walmart has a long and unbroken track record of removing/banning/censoring things too non-consertative/too non-christian/too non-'patrotic'/too 'contreversial' for their perceived vanilla brain dead store-goers. It will remain to be seen what they actually make available.
That when I go to rent a movie, it's usually on a spur of the moment thing. It's like I ask my wife "what would you like to do tonight" and she might say I don't know...wanna rent a movie?
So then we go down to the rental place and look around, not really sure what we want and pick something up and go home THAT NIGHT and watch a movie.
With renting a movie over the net and having it mailed to you isn't quite what we're looking for. We want something we can see that night, not two days from then...because the way we live two days from then we might be doing something else that comes up etc etc. We live by the seat of our pants and never really plan out little things like movie watching in advance.
At least, that's how we play it. Is there really that much need for this out there? Just curious.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
To say the least, that's not going to be good for business
Um, yeah, maybe not for Netflix. But I thought competition was good?
rooooar
I think at least one thing wal-mart has going against it is the worry that they could try to inject their social mores into which DVDs they carry.
If they do not do this, that's fine, but if you're going to limit your selection so you don't carry 'immoral' stuff it's going to hurt you. Not carrying stuff you disagree with isn't a problem if you're the big superstore people go to for convenience, but once they reach the online arena, well, if you're going to bother renting movies online then most likely you're going to be the kind of person who actually thinks "Kite" is kind of neat. There's a reason that people buy music from amazon.com before they'll buy it from Walmart.com, and yes, Marilyn Manson probably has something to do with it.
Then again, maybe Wal-mart's gotten a bit more flexible about that as of late.. i found our local wal-mart carrying "the boondock saints" last week. Given, we're in a college town, but that's still pretty surprising.
I heard Blockbuster for awhile censored their tapes. Is this true, and have they stopped doing it with the move to DVD?
will be better off for it.
OH NOES!!! IT APPEARS YUO DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR DIS HERE PIZZA! WAHT EVER ARE YOU GOING TO DO!?!?
Why rent a DVD, then have to wait for it???? Go to your locally owned, operated, mom and pop video store and check out an indie flick, or a new release even. Support your local stores and help your local economy. Wal-mart employs one of my parents, but my town's local economy is shrinking, and this town could one day dry and blow away. I think this is a common thing all over the U.S.
In short, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BUSINESSES.
Thank you
carry such exotic fare as the non-rated version of "Embrace of the Vampire". So what good is the service? Seriously, Wal-Mart will heavily sensor the movies they carry. I say screw-em.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
There's got to be a reason why this hasn't happened:
a) the people who would use that service probably already subscribe to sites on the Net.
b) when the urge strikes you, you probably want immediate gratification.
c) you can almost guarantee an immediate turnover of the rentals (they get it in and probably send it out next day).
d) the cleaning of returned rentals is probably costly. (j/k...maybe)
Not good for the consumer? Rubbish. You act as though aggressive competition guarantees an irrevocable market dominance. It doesn't! As soon as your theoretical future-walmart doesn't meet the consumer's desire for quality+low prices+convenience (something it currently does quite well, mind you) another business can rise up to meet that need.
Give the consumer due credit -- when a company takes it's customer base for granted and acts like a "dinosaur" it loses market share to smaller, more nimble companies that give the customer what they want. The business history books are full of examples (see Sears & Roebuck, K-Mark, IBM, etc.)
Result? Problem solved, unless you simply don't believe that capitalism works.
Gee, just what I always wanted! A censored DVD rental company! Sigh. I have lost complete and total respect for Wal-Mart over the years. First they started flexing their muscles to censor the video game industry and made it plain that any video game they didn't like wouldn't be sold by Wal-Mart, thus making game companies cave and self-edit their games. Then they pulled some men's magazines off their shelves that had less female skin than most women's magazines these days. Now they want to start renting out DVDs, which I'm quite sure are censored? Heh, good luck.
YEah! I DEMAND streaming porn on the projector at elementary schools! Who is WalMart to tell us what they will and wont sell! HOW DARE THEY have some morals and make decisions that they feel protect their clientele!
Sheesh.. the NERVE of walmart to think that someone like me may not want my six year old son asking why a mostly naked wrestling chick is on the front cover of STUFF magazine in the checkout line! (Stacy Kiebler.. next month).
Well.. I think I'll take my dollar right down to the local dark wank-in-the-back porn shop to show my outrage! (end sarcastic rant).
Dude.. its their store. They can sell, or not sell, whatever the hell they want. If you dont like it, dont shop there, but dont act like its some crime against humanity that Wal-mart doesnt carry pimply faced teenager prot0-spank material at their registers anymore.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
True geeks, IMO, would be MORE likely to rent the DVD rather than download it. It's the casual movie watcher that's happy with a badly compressed version off of Kazaa. Geeks want to enjoy their movies in their full 5.1 surround sound/THX/whatever glory on their big screen.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Hard, though, to have sympathy for a company that nicknamed their product "Mosaic Killer", AKA Mozilla.
Microsoft may have fscked a number of companies, but anyone entering a market where people are already giving away their product should not be surprised when somebody else comes in and gives away their product.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
Perhaps Wal-Mart will surpass Netflix in total sales, perhaps by many times. However, I see these two companies not competing directly.
Wal-Mart has never been anything but a mass market company, with lowest-common-denominator sensibilities. In any category, *especially* movies and music, they sell a relatively short list of only the most popular, mass market items. Michael Jackson? Sure. The latest college radio, big city hipster fave? Forget it, even if they're selling in the millions.
Netflix, OTOH, has always catered to film buffs. They'll probably lose share to Wal-mart in the most popular releases, but will continue to grow elsewhere. So, if you want "Dumb and Dumber IV," go to Wal-Mart, but if you want the Cannes winners, indie greats, art films or classics, you're more likely to find them at Netflix.
Yes, Wallyworld can sell whatever they want, measured against whatever corporate standards of decency they so choose.
... but where the hell else can they go?
... but when all that exists is Windows+IE where the hell can I run it?
But it still saddens me. Here's why, and I've seen this happen over and over and over. Walmart moves in to a community. All the smaller book/record/video/newsstand stores go out of business; they just can't compete. Then all that is left for that community at that point, in an EASILY ACCESSIBLE FORM, is Walmart's definition of "decent".
Yes, I can "shop somewhere else", but what if there IS nowhere else?
Is it legal? I believe it is. Competition == good. It's the American Way (tm). We should all be so lucky.
It is good for the community? I believe it is not.
Also sad is Wallyworld's penchant for pressuring publishers and distributors to modify their books/records/videos/etc before they will stock them. That to me falls solidly in a gray area of legality. Sure, the distributors can go elsewhere if they don't want to edit
Sure I can write a better browser
May I ask someone knowledgable on the subject what can be "evil" about a department store, I have personally been to shops that are overpriced, with bad service or crappy goods but never one that is as morally black as I am told wal-mart is, come on! It's just a frigging retailer!
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
--no it doesn't, it's a net loss. We are running hundreds of billions a year trade balance deficit. We are also at a net loss of over 3 million real jobs over just the past 3 years. Our currency is down over 1/4 against the euro when you run the high/low split. Our unemployment rate is so bad they had to adjust how they count the rate by dropping people who have exhausted unemployment insurance benefits. Some economists estimate the real unemployment might be almost double the official ~ 6% level. They also include people who are only working extremely part time, say a few hours a week, that's classed as fully employed. They dropped food and fuel from the consumer cost of living indices to keep the figures looking good. The recent so called debt figures do not reflect the contractural debt that the government has. They claim we are only at 4.x trillion estimated debt, yet the real figures are closer to 45 trillion, trillion with a T. The fortune 500 companies have almost universally no way to pay for their contractural pension programs, they are busted. Pension insurance last year went into the red from years in the black from only a few companies tapping in to it due to bankruptcy, just a few, with over 38,000 companies still being a part of it and many of which are close to bankruptcy themselves. Most major banks derivatives exposures are so dismal, you'd be hard pressed to see much notice of it in the main broadcast media.
On and on. Walmart is not the sole cause, but it's a wonderful representation of the economic problems over all and what lead to them. If not-manufacturing inside the US was working that great, we would be running a trade surplus, and we aren't. It's a temporary cheap trinket fake out, the bone tossed to keep those still working faked out that their jobs will be safe or something. It's a lie. I KNOW people working at walmart, ALL of them were making more money at their previous jobs, jobs that have poofed in the "new economy", poofed as in not disappeared, but sent elsewhere. The profits aren't going to the people who built these various companies up except at the extreme top levels. It's a universal averaging down.
Sorry, it's sucking in the US and getting worse,well, war factories are doing ok, that's about it.
I can easily remember when a normal even lower middle class blue collar job was more than ample for decent home ownership, supporting a lot of kids, a good car, family vacations and so on. It is NOT that way now. The economy is sliding on the inertia of insane out to lunch credit,outsourcing, selling of assets, it's called in the olden days and warned against "eating your seed corn". It looks like fat city until that seed corn is gone, then you have nothing left to plant. That's a rural reference analogy, I have another I like to use as well. The economy now is akin to a carpenter who on friday night pawns all his tools and his work truck, all weekend long he looks "rich", why look at "that quarters" immense profitability! Comes monday morning he's out of a job. When it's one job like that it's easy to see it's nuts, when a nation does it, with the results being manipulated and shilled from stratospheric levels by the ones who actually profit from it, and the results take a little longer to "trickle down",they call it "good business".
Nutso, there's no proof whatsoever the economy is getting better other than in the snake oil salesmans infomercials. 30 year mortgages for homes and 5 year car notes are no indicator of wealth production and creation, they are the opposite of it in fact, when those same two major asset indicators used to be only 10 years and 18 months respectfully, and not that long ago, and when we were a creditor nation and not a debtor nation, and our trade balances were almost all in our favor. those are indicators of an over all good economy. And even the snake oil salesman have no way to dodge the trade imbalance issue, that's serious folding money you are talking about. If their scheme worked as advertised, we should be seeing an almo