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Wal-Mart Offers Up Downloadable Movies
An anonymous reader slipped us the link to a C|Net article on another downloadable movie offering, this time from retail giant Wal-mart. Stinging from their loss to Netflix in the online DVD rental business two years ago, they are coming out swinging with this service. They've made arrangements with all six major Hollywood studios, and (the article theorizes) will likely have highly competitive prices. With Apple's dominance of this particular market, there is still no guarantee whether Wal-mart will have any success with this program. The biggest problem, commentators note, is that there is no guarantee Wal-mart's service will draw customers into their stores: the issue that ultimately caused them to scuttle the DVD rental service. What do you think of a major retailer getting into movie download business? Will the company be able to outmaneuver Apple and Netflix the same way it has done with other retailers in the past?
If they can provide as good a security model for protecting identity and financial information as Apple, they've probably got a shot. With the record of other brick and mortar stores lately though, they've got an image that needs a little polish though.
Not if Wal-Mart takes the same attitude with online movie downloads as they do with their stores.
Wal-Mart has always been about one thing and one thing only: Dirt cheap stuff. They might as well make it their slogan: "Wal-Mart, where you get Dirt Cheap Stuff(TM)." You can see this attitude in their stores with cluttered aisles, severe lack of cashiers, poor treatment of employees, etc. People have unfortunately been willing to put with this this because, well, they want dirt cheap stuff.
The online movie download business isn't about dirt cheap, it's about customer service. The people who use it aren't poor; they're at least middle-incomers with computers and high-speed access to the Internet. If Wal-Mart tries to go dirt cheap on this service, they're going to get eaten alive in this space.
This'll certainly start to change when the AppleTV comes out, though.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Am I the only one who lands on this article "Who really won during the Super Bowl?"? Is the link wrong?
Global warming is a cube.
Walmart will also be selling TV series. They have more studios signed up than Apple, mainly due, I think, to Walmart's caving in to the Studios demands (same pricing as DVDs).
Rubies and Pearls are not what you think.
Get some trivially cheap item in the store free. Or get points good for money off stuff. Or....
Kroger sold gas with 3cents off thinking people would enter the store. Bwa Ha Ha Ha...Now they don't give us poor scum anything off.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
because if you aren't you sure do imitate one.
I get so tired about hearing how wal-mart supposedly abuses their employees. Look, I know people who work there and they don't have any qualms. Some are students working there (because 24hr operations offer flexibility) and others just because they don't look elsewhere.
While people love to rant about the items Wal-Mart sells how do these same people explain the grocery sections? Same brands as the big supermarkets at significantly lower prices. Heck I can find similar names in their department side of the operation as I can at the mall and save money.
Which brings me back to the online experience. Customer service isn't the real issue, its ease of use, selection, and then cost which will make or break their service. Other than end user billing issues the downloading side shouldn't be that big of a problem. I don't think that the majority of users out there have sufficient bandwidth for high quality downloads.
Why should Wal-Mart get into this? Easy, because it has such a low cost of operation. Pay for bandwidth, the servers, and that is a lot less than a B&M existance. They will still have lots of DVD in their stores but when people finally give up buying DVDs Wal-Mart probably hopes to be established enough to get that business.
I still don't see why people think Apple's service is that great. iTunes is good, but the series and movies are not the quality I would pay for, especially at the price some of the offerings are. A friend told me that the XBOX service is the best way to go but I doubt I will buy a 360 just for movie downloads.
So Wal-Mart gives us a new option. The more the merrier. The free market is a much better decider than other approaches. If Wal-Mart succeeds then they will do so because they deserve it. If they fail, that also is their fault as well.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
... why the !&^!%# would anybody buy the virtual DVD?? This assumes people can't rip the physical object themselves - they're betting on people who pony up for fast internet links but don't use Google?? Oh, and don't own a DVD player.
I don't think that Walmart has a chance - Netflix and Blockbuster have the long tail. If WalMart is banking on only the 'major studios' they're missing the point - selection, selection, selection.
everyone who gets into this space has to deal with "competitors" who offers a better product at the best price(free). That isn't really a position I would think a business would want to be in.
It will succeed, just like Wal-Mart's DVDs-by-mail rental service.
There are already so many customers going to wal-mart, that even if the service is only used by a small fraction of their customers, it would still be a massive amount of people. That's the magic of wal-mart... super high volume!
stuff |
And although in my scan of the article I did not see what tech they are using but I can just about guarantee it will by from your friends at MSFT.
So which will it be? PlaysSometimes or Zune or Real's crummy kit (do they still have kit?).
99/9% certain it will not play on a Mac OR an iPod.
Too bad Apple can't leverage Fairplay to some degree here... then again it would be feeding competition.
Then we agree, because so do I. Although my solution isn't to ignore it happening and rationalizing that it's okay because people obviously work there, it's for us to try to get them to stop.
The same way I explain their stores. If you don't mind digging through misplaced stuff to find what you're looking for, putting up with aisles that are three feet wide, standing in line for half an hour because there are only two cashiers, and don't have any questions about what you're shopping for because the people that work there ignore you and have no clue what the hell they're selling just so you can save a few cents on your Charmin, then Wal-Mart is a great place to shop.
I have too many incidents of unhappiness at Wal-Mart to recount them all here. The two that stick out in my mind were when I needed a few simple items one Saturday afternoon before Christmas several years ago. I walked in and saw two--two!--cashiers open, and people lined up too far to see. I would have been in the store at least an hour. I walked out, drove ten miles to the Target down the street, and haven't been to a Wal-Mart since. The other time was when I sprained my ankle and needed an ice pack and Ace bandage. Wal-Mart was the closest store to me (a mile or so away), so I drove down there, hobbled in, and hobbled back to the pharmacy section. A worker there who was stocking shelves literally watched me as I painfully limped up to her and said that my ankle was sprained, and I would appreciate it if she'd help me find the ice packs and Ace bandages. She pointed away and said, "I think it's two aisles over, maybe three," turned her back to me, and went back to putting the stuff on the shelves.
So yeah, you could say that I seriously doubt Wal-Mart will be able to do anything like run an online movie business competently, and even if the movies are, as I said, dirt cheap, I won't be using it.
Newsflash, ease of use and selection are part of customer service. Cost will be a factor, but I seriously down that the target market (no pun intended) for this service will be looking for movies that cost $2.95 to download instead of $2.99. They'll be looking for the stuff that Wal-Mart truly sucks at, stuff like, as you mentioned, ease of use and selection.
Well hell then, let's all get into the movie download business, since it's so cheap! You're forgetting the cost of developing and maintaining the software, marketing, and guaranteeing a certain level of service and uptime. These kinds of things are not cheap. If Wal-Mart takes their typical attitude of trying to do it on the cheap, you'll have software that is excruciatingly painful to use, lots of system down time due to back-end hardware and software issues, non-existent customer service and support for the mass of e-mail complaints that will pour in, and other such problems.
I don't propose anything different. I'm with you on this, let them compete in the ma
As usual with large chains, it doesn't matter if some product is successful. What matters is whether they consider the share they got in the market as meaningful, and whether they consider the market meaningful. It can be a loss maker, even for years to come, if they consider it a "future market" they will keep it rolling. And since it's "content via internet", it's by that very nature already something pretty much every beancounter considers a future market.
Personally I'd say let's wait and see what DRM they include and whether it's breakable. If it is, it is a market. If it's not, it's not. Simple as that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Poor people shop at Wal Mart because they have to. The stores suck, the employees suck, everything sucks about Wal Mart.
One thing they are missing is that very few basic broadband packages offer enough download size per month to allow stuff like this to take off. Most ISP's offer 5GB-10GB a month for their basic packages, which isn't nearly enough for Wal Mart to make money off of anything.
Wal Marters will try this for a month, then get utterly shafted on usage fees then forget about it. The rest of us already have other venues to get movies.
Wal Mart would have to price this at $1.99 to get any movement, they won't price it at that level; any level they do price it at will suck and no one will care.
So, how did their music download business? Have they made a dent in iTunes yet? Or a scratch, perhaps?
Wal*Mart is unlikely to make this work, because (whatever you think of them) their excellences are not in innovative use of technology. What they are good at is business deals that look good to their suppliers but turn out to benefit Wal*Mart in the long run... and in ratcheting down their suppliers' prices.
How is Wal*Mart going to make their downloadable movies so much cheaper than the competition that they'll be able to drive the competition out of business? Force their IT department to outsource their movie download servers overseas?
And on the Internet everything is nearby. When a brick-and-mortar Wal*Mart succeeds in killing off the local small-town businesses, the local residents are faced with the choice of shopping at the local Wal*Mart or driving a long distance. On the Internet, even supposing that (say) Wal*Mart drives Amazon UnBox out of business, you're not going to have to drive ten miles to shop at the iTunes store.
The only way I can see Wal*Mart winning is if they use their famous muscle to pressure the MPAA into allowing their products to being delivered without DRM, and with the capability of burning a DVD. At the moment, the Wal*Mart video download website seems to be showing me such badly scrambled pages that I can't read how it works, but I don't think that's the way it works now.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Who really won during the Super Bowl? What does that have to do with walmart?
Note how the business strategy is all about exclusive deals, about locking others out of content.
This makes business sense, but the problem here is that unlike in the old days when you shipped content to a news stand or bookstore, it is possible to scale a content delivery business indefinitely. Not cheap, but if the consumer is paying the fare for bandwidth, it is feasible.
The problem I see here is that it creates a situation ripe for a natural monopoly to emerge. If you get exclusives with enough studios, you cripple your competition. I'd love to download movies to iTunes, but so far they've only been able to sign up Disney. So it's nearly useless to me.
This can create a situation where a magnate like Rupert Murdoch can gain incontestable control over a significant slice of mainstream culture. That is bad. The organization controlling distribution will eventually control the point of view people are allowed to see in movies and other media.
This is why we need copyright term limitation. Either we take steps to restrict the freedoms of business to make deals like this, OR we strengthen the commons by expanding the public domain OR we accept control by a single entity over the bulk of information we have available.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Apple dominance? While it's a fair bet that they sell a lot more movies through iTMS than any other vendors sell through through similar services, this industry is still extremely young - too young to declare a dominant vendor so early in the game. Let's table this and take up the discussion again in two years, when the positions of Netflix, Apple, Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, Target, and other future players will be more clear.
Now if you'll excuse me I have some torrent downloads to check on.
Am I the only person who noticed that the link goes to an article about "who really won the superbowl"?
Correct article.
The comment was that the older service didnt' get people into the stores.
My thought is they get enough people in the stores.. but they need to get more people to their web site, to use their various e-services. For example, you can upload digital photos to their site and they will print them and mail them to you.
It seems that offering downloadable movies will appeal to the "net" segment of the population who would be much more into sshopping on their web site, etc.
If they offer affordable movies I would certainly give them a shot and it would make me more loyal to the brand.
http://www.hawknest.com/
i've been on netflix, on and off, for years. never once have they throttled me. i do 4-at-once, get 4 on monday, send them back tuesday, they arrive by thursday, they send more out friday -- if i'm lucky and they come in 1 day (they sometimes to), I can in theory get 4 more saturday. anyway, i've never noticed any throttling, but I hear a lot of people claim it. Maybe your p.o. is what sucks.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I buy very decent athletic shoes from them that's a quarter of what I'd pay at a sports store. The only thing I'm not getting is an endorsement by a celebrity athlete that's paid hundreds of millions of dollars to wear said shoes, which the company then just passes along to the consumer(me). No thank you, I don't give a shit. I vote with my money and Walmart has some values there.
Four things have to happen for me to even try it.
The price is right for my preceived value of the show/series/movie.
I can play it on my DVD player and computer.
I can watch it any number of times.
It's offered in widescreen format.
Bonus: If they offer extras with the download like outtakes/deleted scenes and such from the movie.
1) Sell downloadable DVD movies at a loss to American consumers while competing against Apple the 800lbs Gorilla. ...
2)
3) Profit!
M
2) blah blah I'm smarter than wal*mart blah blah
3) blah blah wal*mart sucks blah blah
4) blah blah the link is wrong blah blah
You're welcome.
This isn't something too new for WalMart. They have been doing music downloads for almost as long as iTunes has been around, and WM sells tracks cheaper than Apple. Advantage? Maybe, maybe not. One thing's for sure, for me to spend an hour waiting for a large download (or overnight for an HD movie), then the price better be significantly lower than buying a physical DVD in the store. I can drive to WalMart and be back with the disk in 30 min. Not only that, but I don't buy movies brand new, I get previously viewed DVDs from the rental store. Buy it for half price and it's guaranteed against scratches and defects (free replacment or money back). Bottom line for me, unless it hits a price-point on par with a previously viewed, it isn't worth the time to download.
that is all I have to say.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
What are the minimum system requirements to download a movie or TV episode?
.NET 2.0 or higher
Switching to Konquerer I was able to browse a coherent page layout and locate these system requirements:
Wal-Mart Video Download Manager
- Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Vista (32 bit only no Macintosh or Linux).
- 256MB of RAM or higher
- 4 GB of hard disk space
- A sound card
- Speakers or headphones (if you want to play a movie or TV episode on your PC)
- An internet connection (broadband recommended)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
- Microsoft Windows Media® Player version 10 or higher (version 10 is preferred for syncing to portable devices)
-
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Interesting that Wal-Mart will have movies for d/l, but no allow a user to put them on the Zune (all 3 people who own them are upset), the PSP (isn't that what Handbrake is for), or that other player that 'some' own known as the iPod. If d/l a movie is only good for the PC / Laptop, then they miss out on the generation today that takes it all with them. Given the limits of Windows Media Player, and the upcoming Apple TV, this is yet another 'news item' that will prove they are missing the boat on the iPod generation. In addition, most movie studios were not entering into deals with iTunes for fear of Wal-Mart. Now that they will offer d/l's, the movie studios have no reason not to allow iTunes as well. Given the amount of $ Disney, etc is getting from iTunes sales, they will go for the bottom line = profit. NavyTim ; www.navytim.com
Navy Tim www.navytim.com
The people who do movie downloads are fairly well off. They've either heard about the societal costs Wal*Mart is creating, or view people who shop at Wal*Mart as inferior. They've been trying hard to overcome this but with little success. If you ask a fashionista to shop at Wal*Mart, you'll likely be met with laughter.
If they overcome this, they'll have to let people understand why it won't work with their iPods. Unless they can work with Apple or the MPAA to come up with a different iPod-compatible system, it's not going to be very popular.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
How does a major retailer expect to succeed when the website for there new online business does not work with Firefox? Saying you need a specific video player to watch the content is one thing but a specific web browser is totally different.
IE only, no Mozilla/Firefox support.
No support for anything other than Windows XP & Vista.
Windows Media Player required.
Give me DRM-free movie downloads and you'll get my business. This will never happen until Apple decides to get rid of DRM, which would allow everyone else to follow suit. This may be a pipe dream, but until it happens, Amen for Bittorrent.
Yeah, I can't even view the page. There's all sorts of overlaid crap on the left side, and I can't read anything. Though I did make out something about "Unsupported Operating System"... (SuSE 10.1 for the record)
I wondered if someone will do in store downloads.
Solves the bandwidth problem. Bring in your storage device, plug in - net, usb, firewire, hey even wifi.
Download in store.
Could offer larger selection than physical stock....
Haven't really thought it through. Idea just popped into the old noggin and I am pressed for time...
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
i tend to buy movies and rarely rent.
if they give a better selection than what is in the stores, then it might be helpful.
if it's something i can download and burn, that might work, but other wise i have no use for it.
I don't think it's necessary for Wal-Mart to be in any more markets than it already is, soon they will own everything and we will live in a Wal-Mart nation, I'm sorry but smiley faces piss me off and that is not where I wanna be
blockbuster, wal-mart, and who knows else could benefit from a "no-internet" download service where you take your thing (laptop/usb harddrive/set top player/xbox) in to the store and snarf movies from the store's intranet at 100mbt/1000mbit. the store downloads movies and then sells them to you. there would be far fewer costs (intranet webserver + NAS + ecommerce app). the stores themselves may only need DSL internet connections.
you could even ship the movies to the store on a drive or disc to save on internet costs.
if i could go into the store and get super cheap movies (saving the draconian DRM discussion for another day) onto a drive in minutes rather than days then ultra-convenience might just rule over price, brand name, and quality.
i think that the super fast no-net option will be the saving grace of the brick and mortar shop when it comes to selling software, movies, and music. the stores can save shelf space for merchandise that cannot be downloaded, the retail chains can save fortunes on not hauling pressed discs around the country in trucks, and blockbuster, walmart, and the rest will finally have an edge over net-flix and iTunes.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
Wal-mart is a juggernut that will crush anything in its path. I predict in 5 years that there will be a Wal-mart flavor of linux.
I realize your situation might be slightly different, but I find it unlikely that you're getting anywhere near 2-3 damaged per month, unless you're getting hundreds of DVD's per month.
From TFA: "Download prices will be $12.88 to $19.88 on the day of the DVD release; older movies will start at $7.50"
... so I also just used up 10% of my monthly internet access to boot! I could drive to walmart (there's one 2 miles from my house, surprise!) and buy the thing in the amount of time it takes to download it.
I don't get it. I really don't.
Why would I, as a consumer, pay the same amount of money as a real DVD at the store for an inferior product (DRM restrictions, lower resolution, etc)?
I then have to download it (time, bandwidth). Comcast still enforces their 40Gb per month limit
No thanks, I'll keep renting and buying real DVDs. Maybe once we all have the equiv. of FIOS and they either price the inferior product accordingly or offer the same product I can buy in the store, I'll think about it.
- Roach
For me, bandwidth is a problem. People in my neighbourhood have caps if they use cable broadband. And that includes me.
For me, selection is a problem. Ever since Blockbuster started with the their "new" keep the movie for too long, and you bought it policy, they don't seem to be restocking old popular movies.
What I would like is something similar to the Kodak photo kiosks already in WalMart stores. A kiosk that allows me to browse songs and movies, with short samples. When I find content that I like, it will transfer to media, and bill me. It would have to burn DVDs and CDs, and produce cover art. It would be nice to produce MP3 and MP4 for portable players directly as well (at a much reduced cost) and write to flash media and USB media.
If something like a media content kiosk is produced, the next step would be to open the content delivery "on-line" as well (I imagine that there would be a repository, or repositories of material to be sent to the kiosks).
Just dreaming...
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
It might be too early to declare a victor if anyone were really doing anything different in movies than they did in Music.
You want cross platform support? Apple is the only game in town. You want to buy as opposed to rent? Apple offers the best pricing (yes, even better than the proposed Walmart pricing) and greatest convenience as well as the widest range of platforms for playback (PC to iPod to iPhone).
So until someone wises up and actually starts selling DRM free movies, you are looking at yet another Apple market stranglehold long term. It's inevitable, since that's what DRM does for a market. It grants early leaders mot of the market later on, with a few fringe companies taking over the online rental space where Apple will not go. Netflix and Microsoft (with the 360 store) will probably be the winners there, each with different and interesting takes on the space.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's freezing outside, and you don't want to burn $2 of gas and spend an hour of your time (you earn, say... $30/hr) running out to a store.
As the other poster pointed out, Amazon serves that need just fine. And if you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you have free second day shipping even for just one disc. If you buy many discs per year that could be worthwhile.
However another factor I wonder about is extras - it really makes no sense to pay for a virtual DVD when it lacks the extras a real one offers. Have people forgotten the draw of commentary tracks and other extras on real DVD's? There's a lot of people that will prefer having real discs in hand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The real question is, will anyone do it? Will they even be able to and still keep things in a DRM wrapper?
I don't know this will win out over things like mail rental of discs unless DRM is abandoned.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He must be in Canada talking about limited volume, here in the states your $15/month ATT DSL is NOT volume limited.
did anyone else notice how the walmart service has a beta tag (yes, literally a tag) on their webpage?
Ever heard of the IE Tab extension for Firefox? ...if you use Windows, of course. :-)
To
Its the upload caps they get grouchy about. I got a phonecall. They said point-blank they don't care what I'm downloading (*cough* movies) but the upload will get me disconnected if it continues getting flagged (I was trying to be a good netizen).
I wasn't honestly terribly surprised since I'd been leaving my P2P client up 24/7 and simply using our local cable provider for service.
Quack, quack.
Oddly enough, I am able to view the website using Safari. But, as others have pointed out, trying to view the site with Firefox is impossible.
ever heard of the javascript console in firefox? it will tell you what's not working and why... wow!
I am hardly a "planner". That's why Netflix is great, I have a giant list of DVD's that I know I want to watch someday, and always have four of them around to choose from.
I think the usefulnes depends on how often you watch movies - I watch one about once a week, at pretty random odd (and never planned) times. Then it goes off, and the next one from the list comes in.
Watching any given movie is not to me a big priority, so much as being able to see something I know I want to watch.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When a person accepts a job offer from Wal-Mart, that person does so for only one reason: no other employer (Target, K-Mart, IBM, etc.) has given them a better job offer. (Unless you want to argue that the person is self-loathing and consciously chooses to accept an inferior job offer -- and you can hardly blame Wal-Mart for that.)
Therefore, Wal-Mart has, by definition, elevated that person's state of affairs. To lash out against Wal-Mart is to reduce Wal-Mart's ability to provide jobs that people want. When a group of activists is successful in preventing a Wal-Mart store from being built, it forces hundres of people to settle for jobs with what would have become their second-choice employer, had the Wal-Mart opened.
It may be hard for some Slashdot readers to grok, but Wal-Mart doesn't hold guns to employees' heads to get them to stay. If there were other employers out there offering better deals to people with the skillset of the typical Wal-Mart employee, Wal-Mart would soon face a labor crisis.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.