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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.
Quick Jeff Bezos, patent DVD rentals and save us from Walmart!
Oh boy! Now I can watch the entire Jersey Trilogy without the elaborate strings of curses and insults! Thanks Walmart. We may even be able to get a family-friendly "Pulp Fiction" available for rent soon. Junior will love it.
Last week my local Walmar had a large vending machine that dispensed the DVD that you wanted to rent. and the machine would accept the returns also.
All I needed was my credit card/ debit card.
Maybe they are looking to expand in both online rental and vending style?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
Given that NetFlix has been pushing pop-under ads to my browser, I've chosen to avoid being a customer of theirs. So, as long as Wal-Mart doesn't start doing the same sort of thing, this sounds like a great idea.
I wonder if they'll have a similar "frequent renters get lower priority" scheme to what NetFlix has.
Walmart announced this service 6 months ago, Oh, wait. Not news, Just expanding their service... Of course Considering that walmart tends to bury the competition... and that their "free" trial is 30 days. Buh-by netflix.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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.
I have always felt of things like NetFlix, and even the Tivo, as a "poor man's video on demand."
You pick the movies you want, and some time, a few days later they are there to watch at your leisure, taking as long as you want, with pause, rewind FF.
Everything you want from video on demand except the ability to pick a movie right now and watch it right now.
Which turns out to be not so important after all. And it's a lot cheaper than putting in all those servers and 7 megabits to every home of highly reliable bandwidth.
Another example of the old adage that you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of magtapes, except this time it's a postal van full of DVDs.
I'm not *too* worried about this. I think Netflix customers are probably somewhat saavier than your standard Wal*Mart customer. Granted, Wal*Mart has the advantage of being able to pour money into the program (a la Microsoft's Ultimate TV) and the advantage of brick 'n' mortar stores to push the product, but if they play the same censoring games as they do with their music, I don't see them taking off. Hell, even Blockbuster is beginning to see the original-aspect-ration light.
If Netflix embarks on an even semi-intelligent ad campaign, I think they have a fighting chance.
-d
Rent DVD porn. I'm serious, the porn market on the internet already makes insane amounts of money. All you need to do is start up a NetFlix service that rents out DVD porn.
:-D
Both NetFlix and the new Wal-Mart service will not carry such titles.
And if anyone out there knows of a service like this already, please, let me know
Wlamart has food, clothing, gasoline, and domestic services all in one handy area..
;)
I guess as soon as they offer housing and, then the dream of corporate feudalism will be complete.
Wal-mart's core customer group are not exactly likely to own DVD players
At $40 or so for a DVD player, who can't afford one?
Well, how much are you going to be able to slash prices on an online DVD rental?
I doubt that's the point. People do their grocery shopping at Wal-mart since groceries are there too. Now they won't have to stop by the video store on the way home either.
I really don't mean this to be a troll... but it occurs to me that Wal-mart's core customer group are not exactly likely to own DVD players.
You kidding me? Where else can you get a DVD player for 40 bucks? not Rad Shack.. anything they sell has to be at least 80.. or they wont sell it. Walmart can hook you up with a passable home theater for under 500 bucks.. and they stock a fairly reasonable selection of DVDs and videos. (And yes, even pulp fiction, uncut, last time I was there looking).
So this is the next logical step for them. Super Walmarts have replaced the shopping mall for all intents and purposes. (Sure.. they sell Kmart level CRAP in most cases, but in some instances you can get good deals there.) The one here has a pharmacy, a grocery store, a pearle vision center, automotive, the usual Walmart crap, a decent electronics and sporting goods area, and an outdoors home decor shop. There really isnt any reason to shop anywhere else. (Unless you want to go to home despot for hardware..).
This is exactly the demographic they want.. the kind of people who are at wal-mart three times a week grocery shopping anyway. The difference between a scheme like this and the ill fated VHS in grocery stores, would be selection.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
It will be good for the consumer because there will be price competition. As it stands now, Netflix has cut down on service and raised prices since they started. In fact, this is EXACTLY the type of service that Wal-Mart should EXCEL at. Wal-Mart is a master of the supply chain, which is the main issue with DVD rental through the mail.
I don't understand the argument against Wal-Mart in regards to small businesses. If Wal-Mart undercut everyone else, pushed small businesses out of business, and then jacked their prices up I could understand the argument. I haven't seen that though, they're always the lowest price. Lowest price is good for consumers. As for the service aspect - I don't need good service to buy rubbermaid, toilet paper, toys, video games, or dvds. I just need/want low price.
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.
According to this article in Slate, Wal-Mart, with $244 billion in revenues last year, represents nearly 2.5 percent of the U.S. economy. Worldwide, they employ 1.38 million.
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?
When I tried Walmart dvd rentals a few months back the selection seemed about the same as NetFlix, but the quantity wasn't there. Just about every title I wanted to rent was a 'long wait', whereas on NetFlix very few titles have any wait whatsoever.
Walmart needs to get a greater quantity of titles before they steal significant market from NetFlix. I would also like to see Walmart enable returns/check-ins at stores (stores could bulk-main discs back to distribution sites).
I currently subscribe to Netflix, and at the rate they are either lost or stolen while in route back to the Netflix warehouse, I wouldn't want to be paying that for each one! Netflix has yet to charge me for those and state they won't unless it becomes frequent.
Anyway, I'll be sticking to Netflix...
I live to gib...
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
'Deliverance' and 'Hee-Haw's Greatest Moments'
I dropped my subscription to NetFlix sometime last year and replaced it with GreenCine, even though they were slightly more expensive and took longer to ship to me. Why? Selection.
I liked getting anime DVDs from Netflix, but the way they kept buying only the first two or three DVDs of a six- or eight-disc series annoyed the frick out of me. I found GreenCine after a short search at Yahoo, and the site promised a greater selection of independent and anime rentals -- and they were absolutely right.
My point is, the real advantage of the online rental market should be greater selection of eclectic titles. Have you ever shopped for movies at Wal-Mart? Mainstream stuff all the way. Their CD selection is even worse. I started buying books and CDs from Amazon.com not for the prices, but because their selection was that much better, even if I lost the advantage of immediate gratification.
If people want to rent mainstream videos, then they'll always do it at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video, where they're promised "guaranteed in stock" even if they only keep it for two nights. Immediacy is more important than "keep it as long as you like" in most consumers' minds; if it weren't, we wouldn't have movie channels on cable TV at all.
So kudos to Wal-Mart for entering a new arena (for them), and may NetFlix be driven to excel even more because of it. But until they both realize the real advantages of what they're doing and offer a wider and more complete selection, I'll happily ignore them both.
That "walmart only, propietary" deal happend to me with a couple of my small refillable propane tanks. I got two from walmart, turns out they put a "walmart_only_ thread on the filler valve, you are forced to get filler-ups/exchanges only at walmart then, unlike my other ones that I can take anyplace handy.
I didn't mind walmart when sam walton was still kicking, it seemed like they at least made an effort to have "made in USA" stuff in abundance, and didn't have weird polices like this propane deal (and what they will probably do with DVDs-good call there), but now,since he's died and who knows who is running it as an economic division of the chinese peoples liberation army, I've about almost completely removed them from sucking on my wallet. Once in a great while I get stuck, and have no recourse but to go in there, and every time I see aisle after aisle of lost homes, lost jobs, lost equity, lost cars, basically a lot of lost hopes and dreams disgusied as cheap trinkets, like what were used to purchase manhattan island. Trinkets, ohhh shiny and cheap.
They are that-cheap. Cheap as in price, cheap as in quality, but very expensive with a bigger look at when once those dollars leave the shores of the US and cease acting as an economic force multiplier.
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
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