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Wal-Mart Turns Over DVD Rentals to Netflix
prostoalex writes "US retail giant Wal-Mart is turning its DVD rental business to Netflix. No word on how much money the deal is worth but Netflix will feature promotional Wal-Mart links for the 100K customers it gets from the retail chain."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/24/14582
This is a cross-promotion agreement, not Wal-Mart taking over Netflix's DVD selection. Wal-Mart's DVD rental business was not really very large, with only about 100k customers to Netflix's 3 million. Wal-Mart never really heavily promoted their offering, and I think they just figured it would be a lot more cost efficient to leverage Netflix's massive existing infrastructure specializing in this sort of thing rather than trying to maintain staff of their own for something that is destined to be a very small portion of their overall business. On the radio, they noted that Netflix reported revenue of $506 million for the entire year. Wal-Mart, by contrast, makes that much in revenue in LESS THAN A DAY.
This is not unprecedented of course. Wal-Mart allows other people to provide services under contract rather than providing those services themselves in their own stores. Examples would be things like McDonalds, and the other Cafe-style things that are in the front of every Wal-Mart, and are not owned or run by them.
I learned this crap the hard way. Back when Wal-mart started having their bins-o-DVDs for cheap, in the hillbilly hills of somewheres, I was able to get them for $4 a piece... and while I didnt LOVE everything I bought, the movies were well worth $4 (or so I thought).
Then I started watching them... and noticed DUBBING over some swear words... WHAT THE HELL? Scenes were missing... the same ones that USA or TNT would cut out (In the Lawnmower man, the only GOOD parts were removed). Needless to say, I was SO furious, I too refuse to shop at the place
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Probably not:
"We're studying our options about what to do about the patent, but our primary strategy doesn't rely on patents. Our primary strategy is to have a service that works better than any other service -- that consumers not only like but rave about to their friends -- and that's what's propelling our growth"
From this link to an interview with Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings.
Here a link to radio interview with him as well.
I live in north Alabama (stop laughing). and yes, Wal-mart is big in my neck of the woods. But if you think Microsoft is evil, you should look at Wal-mart a bit more closely. A town near me at one time had 3 grocery stores. now, they have A wal-mart. 3, count em...3 locally owned buisnesses have been shoulderd out of the picture by a large multi-national company. 3 economy helping buisnesses have closed thier doors. so, now.. you have to shop at wal-mart, or drive 20+ mins to the closest grocery store. I figure that each store had at least 40 employees. that's 120 people now out of a job, and wally world hasn't got that many employees. so... we've increased the unemployment, decreased the number of locally owned buisnesses, and made one hell of a traffic jam. now they want to take out the movie rental places. Somehow i don't think Sam Walton would appreciate this
Movies are frequently edited in advance into formats "suitable" for general television audiences and other venues, such as in-flight presentation. I would hazard to guess that in many cases, packaging for retail toned-down titles would cost no more than that of manufacture, as the materials have already been produced. With a marketer as large as Wal-Mart, the additional manufacturing cost is likely negligible.
WalMart shipped from Arkansas, so you can imagine how long it took for disks to travel back and forth to the rest of the country. It was usually a 2-3 day trip each way here to Dallas, Texas, for example. And the selection was even worse than Blockbuster's online service, if you can believe it.
:)
I've belonged to 4 rental services, and this is the order I rank them:
customer service:
1) Greencine (usually a few hours for email reply during the day, some of the staff seem to remember you by name, and they also often show up in the discussion boards),
2) Netflix (known for throttling service sometimes (less often these days), and takes a couple days to answer emails)
3) WalMart
4) Blockbuster far behind. 3-4 days to answer emails, empty slots when I had a queue of hundreds for a couple days at a time and each of them was supposedly "available now" - and I live within 30 miles of the national headquarters and the main distribution center.
selection:
1&2) Netflix, Greencine. GC has a better anime selection for now, as well as more hard to find foreign titles. Netflix has much better availability on almost every title it actually stocks, and is edging up on the anime. But it's still not there with foreign titles, either. Best selection for most people, however.
3) Blockbuster had mostly the same titles you'd see in its stores. But as I said earlier, a lot of them weren't really available when they claimed they were.
4) WalMart basically had a subset of what Blockbuster did. They did keep the slots full, however.
speed:
1) Netflix! They win by a landslide, having dozens of distribution centers, so there's probably one near you. However, they have been known to throttle customers after the grace period, and some of those "shipping tomorrow" or "shipping in [two days]" messages look suspicious. They don't do shipping or receiving on Saturdays, unfortunately.
2) Blockbuster. They have a number of distribution centers, but they are slower to process returns and mailing out. Not to mention that I had empty slots for days, several times. I think I may have seen them ship/receive on Saturdays, though.
3) Greencine. Unfortunately, their one center in California is their Achille's heel, as it takes days for anyone outside the region to get DVDs or send them back. It usually takes 2-3 days for a disc to get to Dallas, and 4-5 days to get back to California. The postal service seems spotty in this regard. Note, they DEFINITELY work on Saturdays as well, which is very important in their case.
4) Walmart's center is in Arkansas. They're about as slow as Greencine. No, I don't think they work on Saturdays. Sometimes I wondered if they worked on Mondays and/or Fridays, either...
overall value:
Netflix is the best overall value for most people; I usually get 15 discs a month on the standard 3-out plan. I get 9 discs from Greencine on average with their 3-out plan, but I'm a foreign film fan who sometimes watches anime, so I'm keeping them around. I will say that last fall I dropped NF and kept GC, but GC had some customer service and shipping problems in January and February, so I restarted NF to supplement. Blockbuster shipped somewhere between Netflix's average and Greencine's, but their selection and customer service makes them not worth the trouble. Seriously. I canceled at the end of last year. And WalMart shipped about as many as GC, so they'd have been a nonstarter even if they weren't shutting down, now. I cancelled within 2 or 3 months, I think
I've found that Blockbuster doesn't have a *better* deal than Netflix, though it is cheaper. In return for being cheaper, however, it takes longer to get the next item on the list, I'm a lot less likely to get the top choice in my queue, the UI is generally less usable, the recommendations system is not as good, and it generally seems trickier to happen upon the lesser-known films that can turn out to be so enjoyable.
And yes, I am cancelling, at the end of the month.
Agreed. Wal-mart's buyers are notorious. They can and will dictate how a supplier can do business with Wal-mart, to the point where a supplier (Rubbermaid was a well known example) would have to open their books to Wal-mart to see where "inefficiencies" could be found.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Or are you going to tell me the censored movies are not censored?
In short, yes. They are modified, surely (which probably makes them suck a lot), but Walmart is just a huge sales channel for content providers, who in this case are movie distributors.
If distributors own the rights to the content, and choose to modify the content to meet Walmart's policies, it's their choice.
I'm not surprised the choose to modify content. That way they can exploit Walmart's retail channels. For a lot of money. For the distributors. And it's their movie. That they modified. Ergo, no one "censored" it.
Sure. The whole part where the monkey comes to Job's house (Job thinks he is CyboMan), then he gets blown to smitherines... that was taken out.
When Job later is all twisted and Evil and he goes and makes the doctors wife go out and start shooting at the men in black, while they blow her to bits.... that part is removed as well.
kthx
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
IIRC, Walmart's response is "they can buy their DVD somewhere else if they don't like it." Many of us do just that, although it doesn't deter many regular walmart shoppers.
Generally, those that disagree with Walmart's DVD and CD practices are those of us who also have a long-standing boycott on the company, so I'm not sure whether it really bothers them.
Obviously you havent been subject to Netflix's dubious (illegal?) practice of "throttling", whereby they stop sending DVDs to long-term customers because their market strategy is to target new customers who forget to rent movies.
I was forced to quit Netflix a year ago [as a 2+ year customer, my average wait time for a movie was 4 months near the end].
The "throttling" process is well documented in the NY Times and elsewhere (http://www.manuelsweb.com/netflixjournal2.htm), by hundreds of cheated customers.
Netflix IS the bad guy, so its bad news for them to merge with their 3rd largest competitor, as only evil (netflix) and evil (blockbuster) are left.