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?

Comments

Security

[Nerdfest]

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.

Re:Security

[geeber]

I think the bigger problem is price. At least for myself, I want to treat a download as a rental - get the movie quickly, watch it once and forget about it. However, according to the article, in order to keep the studios happy they have to charge a similar price to what the movie costs in stores (almost $15 for Superman Returns, for example). So you pay way more than a rental, but you don't get the cool packaging and liner notes that you would get if you bought it in a store. What is the advantage here?

Re:Security

[tomstdenis]

What's the advantage of most things they pump at us? I'm waiting till the studios figure out that they could pack boxsets on fewer discs using blueray/HD instead of just upsampling and wasting space. Nothing ruins the fun of watching a series than having to change DVDs every couple episodes (though maybe the getting up and changing the disc bit is how they force us to remain so uber physically active?)

Tom

Re:Security

[tomstdenis]

I dunno, for me the attraction is the space not the quality. I don't have super human vision and frankly i don't care for quality beyond DVD quality. If I want to look at detailed line art schematics or whatever, I'd use my 1280x1024 LCD to look at it. I don't need to buy a 3000 dollar HD tv for that. I still don't get why they cost so much.

On the flipside, provided that Blueray disks don't cost more than DVDs to press [???] boxsets would become cheaper as they would require fewer discs, less packaging, etc... So there is already incentive to offer them in that format.

Tom

Re:Security

[CastrTroy]

I've always thought the studios were braindead. I think most people would buy 2 or 3 CDs a week if they only cost $5. Instead, they make them cost around $15, so I'm lucky if I buy 1 a month. Most CDs aren't worth that much. It's even worse with downloads. Why would you pay $11 for the downloaded album, when you can get the CD for $15? iTunes don't really cost anything to distribute, so they should make it smart, and charge $.25 for a song. Absolutely nobody would pirate music because it just wouldn't be worth their time. People would be buying them like hotcakes, and the studios would be making even more money. But instead they inflate the price to the highest number they think anybody would pay, and make very few sales compared to the number of people who actually would like to have a copy of the song.

Re:Security

[tomstdenis]

Agreed.

Studios don't make the best use of technology. Look at DVDs for instance. You could cram roughly 6 audio CDs uncompressed on a DVD. Instead? They only sell 5.1 surround mixes with videos and all that. Which is cool I guess, but when you're shopping for a Johnny Cash box set, it'd be cool to get it all on one DVD instead of a box of CDs.

I agree on the cost too. Personally I rarely buy CDs. Mostly I get them from amazon when I decide that the album is actually worth my cash. But if they were reasonable I would buy more. I recently looked at getting the Scrubs series. ~$42 per box. That means for the series so far I'd have to pay ~$210 CAD, plus tax and shipping. That's a bit ridiculous and as a result I don't own any of them (why only own a few, when if you want to collect the series you really want them all). Now if they were say $15-20 per box I'd consider buying the set...

Tom

Re:Security

[saboola]

The quality difference is so minute between 720p and 1080p that its not worth shelling out an extra $1k for a difference you probably wont see anyways.

1080p however does matter if you want to use that same TV as a computer monitor. It's generally cheaper than buying a large flatpanel monitor, but of course not as high of a resolution. For me however, 1920x1080 works quite nicely, especially at 42". Also the cost difference during my research has been about 500 dollars, not 1000.

Re:Security

[Itchyeyes]

That's pretty much the crux of economics. Different people are willing to pay different amounts. You can shout till you're blue in the face how you'd buy more if it only cost less, but it won't make much difference. If they lowered the prices on DVDs and CDs then they would certainly gain more customers. Doubling their customer base doesn't help any though if it means cutting margins by any more than 1/2. CDs and DVDs are both massively profitable items. I imagine that the prices are very carefully calculated to yield the maximum amount of profit (feel free to correct me if anyone has statistics to prove otherwise).

In contrast though, I would say that downloadable videos and songs are nowhere near their ideal price. The biggest problem is all this DRM and poor quality drastically reduces their worth to consumers. As an alternative to current options, they're abysmal. Take a look at Walmart's store here. I haven't seen many details, but it's pretty safe to assume that these will not be burnable to DVD, will not play on anything other than the PC they're downloaded on, will likely be fairly heavily compressed, and will be DRM'd to hell. Given even one of those conditions is true, why the hell would I pay the exact same price as a DVD for one of these downloads? At least iTunes gives me some break on the price. This store will be dead in the water from the first minute and we'll just here more croaking from the **AA execs about how they can't compete with illegal downloading.

Re:Security

[networkBoy]

I care. It's WalMart. I won't buy from them. Period.
-nB

Re:Security

[beckerist]

How is this a troll? Seriously, mods, this should be insightful. He makes a perfect point. Printing a scaled newsletter on a 4x6 sheet of paper, versus a non-scaled version on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper DOES NOT make it 1/4th the price (ie: 1/4th the paper / ink used) as there are so many other aspects to "cost" than just the materials used. HD may be more expensive to produce (as HD cameras are more expensive to buy, HD storage requires more space, etc...) BUT the standard packaging, shipping, retail, etc... should NOT change. The only difference, again, being production, which shouldn't add so much to the end product outside increasing the cost by a mere few percentage points.

With this said, the HD market is looking to be nothing but LUCRATIVE for those players involved, especially in the retail, packaging, shipping areas. The only increase in cost is coming from the movie studio's, which again brings up the chicken/egg scenario, but once the cost of purchasing HD cameras and HD-DVD/BR burners has been made back, the rest should be the same (or close to it). As they are selling these at a premium, that really only means profits!

Re:Security

[ShimmyShimmy]

I imagine that the prices are very carefully calculated to yield the maximum amount of profit (feel free to correct me if anyone has statistics to prove otherwise).

I couldn't have said it better myself. Of course, this ignores the concept of a "fair" price. But since the word fair is such a difficult word to pin down, I'll have to give it my best shot.
There is the model of competitive pricing, which is more or less built on the cost of selling. When you go the grocery store to buy your dozen eggs, you can see they're not very expensive; a dollar at most in most areas. I would say that is relatively in line with how much it costs to get the eggs there, with just enough left over to make the grocer 'feel like' putting them there, and the farmer to sell them.
Now there's the darker side. I feel like I first became aware of this concept at my local amusement park, with the obviously jacked up food prices. It's $2.50 for the cup of french fries, which after cost of goods and wages, probably set them back 45 cents at most. I use this example not only because it's the perfect example of monopoly pricing, but also because there's a (relatively) fair market price waiting outside at your local fast food joint. 99 cents for more or less the same product.

I think consumers subtly realize when they're getting screwed. Wendy's doesn't have access to a pricing model of "do you get your food or don't you", they're stuck with "get it here or get it elsewhere". The amusement park definitely realizes you can't get it elsewhere, and the prices show it. People buy, of course, because it's usually a pain to leave and come back, and a day with hungry->whiney kids is hardly 'amusing'.
Ok, so maybe I should be thankful that my local amusement park is offering me the choice to not go hungry, but I know I'm getting screwed. They're making their extra buck off of my back, and I'm well aware of it. The same goes with the record labels. They keep the copyrights for the works that 'their' artists produce, so they don't have to fight against someone else selling the same music. Thanks to their convenient cartels, they don't even have to compete with each other over similar genres. The result? You guessed it. Overinflated prices. Again, this concept of a "fair" price is a difficult one to pin down, but I would certainly say it's less than the $12.75 we're stuck with now. Even 99 cents per song for the ones I like is a tough sell. I've been on a farm before (well, at least visited one), and I have a small idea of what a pain in the ass it is to raise chickens. I feel like a dollar is a pretty modest price to pay for 12 of them, actually.

Now there's the RIAA. Of course, their model is based on a certain amount of uncertainty of whether or not an artist will succeed, so it's a bit harder to gett a spot price (as opposed to measuring the effort it takes to raise chickens for eggs). Well, they claim that it's a lot, but in my experience, whenever a company is being secretive about their pricing, I've found that something fishy is usually going on. Music consumers (and artists... the monopoly works both ways) have been getting screwed for a long time, and it's no secret. Now, somebody comes along with a way to screw them back, and they cry foul? Please. I don't want to hear it.

What the Napster era really produced wasn't a country full of pirates. It was a new fair price. Now, the music industry actually has to compete with something. And it sucks for them. Bye-bye amusement park profits. Hello market price. But back to this

Not if it's like their stores.

[KingSkippus]

Will the company be able to outmaneuver Apple and Netflix the same way it has done with other retailers in the past?

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.

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[kmac06]

You are confusing poor service with a poor product. I won't argue that Walmart may have poor service, but that and the fact that the prices are low does not mean that the quality is necessarily poor as well. There is plenty of good quality stuff at Walmart

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[swissfondue]

I think Walmart's business model might be: "Get the pundits to buy the DRM infested lower quality download, then for a bit more cash, they can grab a DVD the next time they come into our store".
Makes sense, but I'm sure it is Windows-land only. Anyhoo, I'm on a Mac, and I live in Switzerland, so WTF do I care?

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[Lumpy]

"The online movie download business isn't about dirt cheap, it's about customer service."
you haven't used Netflix then.

Throttling my movies because we watch them that night and return them the next morning. they make damned sure you can not get any more than 2 deliveries in a week, and when you get throttled you get 1 a week.

Try calling them ... Poor/nonexistent customer service
Most DVD's are damaged pretty badly because if the crappy mailing system. I recieve on average 2-3 cracked DVD's a month.

I still use them because they are better than Blockbuster, but nobody in their right mind thinks any of the online movie rental businesses are about customer service.

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[Threni]

> The online movie download business isn't about dirt cheap, it's about customer service.

Don't be a dweeb. I want cheap downloads. I don't care about service, nor about the condition of the stores. I'm going to buy movies online from the cheapest supplier because what you'll be downloading will be *exactly* the same, no matter where you get it. I'm paying for it via a credit card so I don't care if the company goes bust or is dodgy - it's not my money on the line.

Can you provide me with a single credible reason for ever going with a company other than the cheapest one for online movie downloads?

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[giorgiofr]

Multiplatform compatibility, different codecs, faster downloads, better interface (à la last.fm, for example)

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[bouis]

People like Wal-Mart, not only because of the convenience and the fair and consistent prices, but because they have no-hassle return policy. It might not seem like much to you, today, but try taking something back to a store 20 or 30 years ago-- much less after you've opened it.

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[Threni]

Hmm. I was thinking more about downloading a DVD image, burning it and watching it. Like a torrent site, only legal and with a charge (but a charge that reflects the fact that I'm going to have to download and burn it before I can watch it, and therefore cheaper than normal).

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[xzvf]

$19.88 download of Windows only crippled move. Not a deal. No extras, worse quality. Sounds like the Amazon movie thing. They appear to be trying to protect DVD margins when they should be trying to do what Wal Mart does best. Revolutionize the distribution chain to gain advantage. 1. DVD's take up a lot of floor space in stores. $$$ 2. Holding DVD inventory. $$$ 3. Physical Security. $$$ Use online distribution to cut costs, allow real physical copies that can be used in standard DVD players, and create a way people can buy DVD's in store (burning and cover art printing kiosks). Give people more for less, otherwise it will fail.

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[giorgiofr]

I'd be happy with H.264/AC3 mkvs with a few subs thrown in. I watch movies on my PC anyway. BitTorrent technology would be the obvious choice, if only it were not intrinsically unsuitable for streaming. WRT to the price point, I think I'd pay up to 2$ for a movie, 10$ for an anime series. I realize I'm being cheap but, given decent adoption, distribution costs approach 0 in this scenario. That, and the distributors must understand they are competing with *free*.
However, such scenario would never see the light of day for the simple reason that dedicated teams would pop out and buy movies and redistribute them for free (or ultra cheap). I can pay 6$ a month for unlimited FTP access to a huge pirate anime repository. I've got the bandwidth, and many series are not being distributed officially and in japanese w/subs anytime soon in Europe. The reason why this happens is that we're talking about un-DRM'ed files here: without serious DRM, the kind of scenario I'm talking about would fail quickly.

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[ja-ja-morkmorkmork]

the junk that is offered to walmart consumers is not the same as merchandise that manufacturers sell to other retailers, even with the same branding - see snapper & rubbermaid...
caveat emptor

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[Bob3141592]

It's not always the same stuff, even if the brand packaging is nearly identical. Read the ingredient list and you'll find differences. Wal-Mart makes it's suppliers cut corners to keep the price down or be locked out of the largest potential customer base. A few suppliers have refused to deal with Wal-Mart rather than to compromise their quality.

The presumption that the items sold in Wal-Mart are the same because they look the same is often incorrect. Check it out and see for yourself.

Re:Not if it's like their stores.

[mstone]

---- Easy to use? The idiots at Apple forgot the most basic of user controls: the on-off switch.

Pushing any button turns an iPod on. Pushing and holding the play/pause button turns it off. Thank you for demonstrating your lack of knowledge of the product you want to slam. Bonus points for the boneheaded idea that 'pushing one button to turn the device on, then pushing another button to make it do something interesting' counts as good usability.

---- Remember when they had a tiny pinhole to eject disks while their PC competitors had an eject button?

Yeah.. the pinhole was for edge cases where telling the OS to eject the disk didn't work. If you hanker for the ability to physically eject a disk from the device before a write is complete, your usability cred has just taken another hit.

Your trouble is that you've mistaken 'making trivial actions immediately visible' for 'usability'. In many cases, trivial actions get in the way of good usability.

Case in point: turning an iPod on and off. Who actually wants to do that? Where's the use case for someone picking up a portable music player and saying, "I want to turn it on. That's all. Once I've turned it on, I'll put it down and go away." There isn't one. 'Turning the device on' isn't a goal, it's just a prequisite for the real use cases, like "I want to listen to a song."

Good usability eliminates as many trivial prerequisite steps as possible. What physical constraint in the use cases forces me to design a device where the Play button doesn't work unless I've pushed some other button first? There is none. If 'make sure the power button is ON' precedes every freaking step in your instructions on how to get something users actually want out of the product, then it's my job as a designer to say, "y'know, I could save the user a step by moving that 'make sure the power is on' operation down into the hardware."

Here's a design problem for you: what happens to a device with a physical on/off switch when the user turns it on, puts it down, and walks away? The device continues to burn power, that's what. In other words, you have a device that will run out of power overnight (or sitting in a coat pocket during the day) if the user forgets to turn it off after they hit the 'stop playing' button.

Quick hint: 'running out of power while I was away' is rarely considered a feature.

Of course, we can eliminate that problem by building in some soft-power logic and having the device turn itself off after N minutes of inactivity. But that completely undercuts your beloved on/off switch. Having the switch in the ON position no longer means the device is ON.. the switch can be ON but the device can be OFF thanks to the soft-power logic. So how do we turn a device in that state back on? Flip the switch OFF then back ON again? Users will just love that. How about hooking the soft logic to the control buttons so pushing any button turns the device back on?

Hey look! We've just reinvented the iPod soft-power interface, with an extra and essentially useless power button on the side. Users will flip that switch ON when they take the device out of the package and just leave there for the rest of the device's lifespan.

Or how about this: if we admit that soft-power totally screws the rationale behind an ON button, we can still find valid use cases for an OFF button. Sometimes I don't want the thing to turn on when I hit a button. Of course, there are valid use cases for users wanting to block unwanted pushes of all the other buttons, too. So how about we make our on/off switch mean 'the device does/doesn't listen to the buttons' rather than 'the power is on/off'?

Hey look! We've just reinvented the iPod's HOLD switch.

And that my friend, is the difference between 'usability' and 'making trivial mechanics immediately visible'.

Apple vs Microsoft

[Zouden]

With Apple's dominance of this particular market, there is still no guarantee whether Wal-mart will have any success with this program.

I'm not so sure of Apple's dominance. I'd like to see some statistics about this market, but I got the impression that the Xbox 360 HD Download service is very popular- possibly more than iTunes?
This'll certainly start to change when the AppleTV comes out, though.

Link

[giorgiofr]

Am I the only one who lands on this article "Who really won during the Super Bowl?"? Is the link wrong?

Re:Link

[grimwell]

And for an added bonus the link to Wal-Mart's video store within the story is broken.

Article link

Wal-Mart Video Store note: the site renders horribly in Mozilla & Firefox... at least for me.

Re:Link

[MadAhab]

For real - that site renders HORRIBLY. What it looks like is a badly designed CSS-heavy site with the CSS for firefox 100% broken or missing.

Oddly it renders just fine in Konqueror. And Epiphany looks like Firefox. And Opera looks fine.

Haven't tried, you know, using it or anything, but for a major company like Wal-Mart to do this bad a job, in this day and age, with a mainstream web browser, is AWFUL. Particularly because you actually have to go to some lengths to make it look this bad - it doesn't happen casually. You have to have made a conscious decision to do multiple different things to make it this bad!

I walked into the Wal-Mart online video store, and they gave me the finger.

corrected link

[swissfondue]

The article can be found here

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).

Are you a parrot

[Shivetya]

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.

Re:Are you a parrot

[antifoidulus]

But how Wal-Mart treats employees can and does affect the tax payer. Case in point, Wal Mart got into a lot of trouble over stating that many of their workers in Maryland would be better off on the state's(tax payer funded) insurance than on Wal-Marts(Walton funded) insurance. Another even more reckless point is that Wal-Mart stated that inclimate weather is no longer an excuse for being late for work. How many white collar employees that weren't in critical(and thus usually better compensated compared to their peers) roles would accept this? It also puts everyone else in danger. While obviously there are exceptions, I would wager that more often than not Wal Mart employees tend to drive less reliable cars that are less likely to have snow tires and they are less likely to have (good) car insurance. So what happens if they are rushing to work after dropping the kids off in bad weather and they wreck because they were trying to satisfy Wal Mart's unreasonable demands. They may cause loss of life to themselves or others, they are more likely to cause significant property damage that they cannot pay to recompensate, traffic may get snarled, the police may have to spend money getting them out of there. Everyone BUT Wal-Mart loses, and yet it is Wal-Marts policy. They would rather see this happen than give someone an hour or two of overtime while they are covering a shift for someone who cannot make it into work. That is how Wal-Mart's policies towards employees hurt everyone.

Re:Are you a parrot

[Chmcginn]

Do you have children? Have you ever tried to take them to day care and/or school an hour, or even half an hour, early?

Re:Are you a parrot

[Undertaker43017]

Most Wal-Mart store employees are not white collar employees, so comparing them to what white collar employees may or may not expect isn't a fair comparison. Most blue collar employees are expected to be at their jobs at a certain time or they get docked pay, that's way it is, if you don't like it, find a job you can make it to on time or better yourself and move into a white collar job, where the expectations MAY be less.

As for the weather making them late, maybe they should plan better. I have never had snow tires (even though I could easily afford them) on my car, and I'm not involved in accidents or late for work when it snows, because I plan ahead and leave earlier. BTW, most of the accidents I see in the snow are caused by idiot SUV drivers that think they are invincible in the snow, but forget that ultimately you have to stop that beast. I would be surprised if a majority of Wal-Mart employees are driving $30K+ SUVs.

WalMart vs. Netflix

[KaOsx42]

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.

history has taught us

[j00r0m4nc3r]

It will succeed, just like Wal-Mart's DVDs-by-mail rental service.

The service doesn't have to draw customers

[192939495969798999]

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!

Are you a Wal-Mart manager?

[KingSkippus]

I get so tired about hearing how wal-mart supposedly abuses their employees.

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.

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.

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.

Customer service isn't the real issue, its ease of use, selection, and then cost which will make or break their service.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't propose anything different. I'm with you on this, let them compete in the ma

Re:Are you a Wal-Mart manager?

[Jediman1138]

Alright.

I'm 18 and a senior in high school. I work at a hometown Wal-Mart in a small town of about 5,000 in western Indiana. It pays much better than anything else around here that will hire me. (45 cent raises yearly and the chance for paid vacation, as well as profit sharing bonuses, and the best part, no flipping burgers)

I've seen the documentary about Wal-Mart, and to my knowledge of the inner workings, it's all true. However, the way the stores function really comes down to the store management, and has much less to do with corporate policy.

I happen to work with a great management team, save for one department manager from Hell. Aside from her, my store manager and the two assistants are really great people and good at what they do. The cashier situation you described likely had more to do with people calling in rather than poor scheduling. We had a similar situation at our store in the Christmas '05 season. Inexcusable? Yes, but I can guarantee they tried calling people in, and I don't know what the situation is like at that store, but at mine, if there are no cashiers, management will work the registers themselves. All of them. Not just one or two.

As for your situation with the worthless employee near the pharmacy, that IS a problem I see at my store. See, I like nearly 100% of all the people I work with. I'm the youngest employee at our store, but we all get along and it's pretty much like a family, but I work with a lot of lazy people. Yeah, I can see how hard it would be to get motivated with such lackluster benefits. I mean, Hell, our discount is only 10%. This is something that management has trouble working on in every store. It is hard to motivate people to do better.

I work in the the Electronics department mostly and I know that if I ever have to direct someone to a product, I will personally walk there, show it to them, ask them if they have any questions, and be on my way. I do take pride in my work, at least when it comes to things I am knowledgeable about. This needs to be done more often, clearly, but how can you force people to be knowledgeable and courteous when you bascially have to hire anyone, as per corporate policy?

We do have training, but they are done with modified PowerPoints and are completely worthless. Everyone I know skips through them because they take so god damned long.

Yes, Wal-Mart has some service issues to get past, but don't blame one store for your experience with the company as a whole.

...and

[Konster]

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.

Re:...and

[Paulrothrock]

Where are you that you have volume limits on your broadband? I've downloaded and uploaded hundreds of gigabytes of information (legally) and nobody from my ISP has complained.

Wal*Mart doesn't have the right competencies

[dpbsmith]

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.

Re:Wal*Mart doesn't have the right competencies

[jratcliffe]

"Wal*Mart is unlikely to make this work, because (whatever you think of them) their excellences are not in innovative use of technology."

Honestly, this is completely wrong. What made Wal*Mart the juggernaut is EXACTLY the effective use of technology. Wal*Mart invested in computerized inventory and a company-wide satellite-based data network way before anyone else. As a result, they knew EXACTLY what was selling in each store, and could manage inventory much, much better than anyone else. Brought down costs, and ensured that the products were actually on the shelves.

Business Strategy

[hey!]

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.

Apple dominance?

[Random BedHead Ed]

With Apple's dominance of this particular market, there is still no guarantee whether Wal-mart will have any success with this program.

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.

throttling

[ClioCJS]

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.

It Might be worth it.

[Nathgar]

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.

Summary of comments

[amyhughes]

1) blah blah DRM blah blah
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.

System Requirementrs

[JoeCommodore]

What are the minimum system requirements to download a movie or TV episode?
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)
- .NET 2.0 or higher

Image Problem

[Paulrothrock]

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.

Article is "Who really won the superbowl"!

[Eivind Eklund]

Let me link you all to Wal-Mart partners with studios in download deal on CNet.com, originally from The New York Times.

Eivind.

Why would anyone use these services?

[BrianRoach]

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"

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 ... 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.

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