Wal-Mart Closes Online Movie Download Service

eldavojohn writes "A year after opening its movie download service, Wal-Mart has abandoned the endeavor. They claim this is a result of HP's decision to stop supporting its video download store software. The article also notes that, unlike iTunes, Wal-Mart offered variable pricing which attracted a lot of studios. 'The world's largest retailer instead turned its rental service over to Netflix Inc. Wal-Mart still operates a music download service and continues to sell CDs and DVDs at retail stores and over the Internet for shipping by mail.' Is this evidence of the strength of unified pricing in media downloads or just another company being squished by the giant Netflix & Apple?"

Comments

Businesses are NOT swiss army knives

[mcsqueak]

Is this evidence of the strength of unified pricing in media downloads or just another company being squished by the giant Netflix & Apple?"

I think this is evidence of businesses trying to be too many things to too many people and slowly discovering that no, you can't be everything to everyone. "Jack of all trades, master of none" indeed.

Focus on a specific market and DO THAT WELL.

Re:Squished?

[0100010001010011]

"Walmart is large, but it is horribly inefficient"

I hate my local Walmart as much as the next guy. And individual stores may be inefficient or suck. But the corporation as a whole is extremely efficient. I work in the trucking industry. Walmart is one of the companies that can afford to spend $1000 on an experimental MPG increaser. Whether it be APUs for the trucks, side skirts for the trailers, single tire rears, etc. If engine company X can provide .1 MPG extra per year on average, that's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for Walmart.

They forced use of APUs on ALL trucks after doing a trial run. At a trucking conference they presented their savings broke even at 16 months. Now a ton of other companies are following their lead.

I thought I read on /. that they're going to RFID. As soon as Walmart forces RFID, maybe we'll see it everywhere. UPC is nice but old.

I don't have a lot of nice things to say about walmart, but that they're inefficient isn't one of them.

Re:Wal-Mart "squished"?

[MBraynard]

Walmart doesn't fit into this 'life style'

If that were true, then the city wouldn't have needed to pass laws to make it impossible for WM to open up.

Chicago is surrounded by 42 Wall-Marts and the city-dwellers are exceptionally eager for WM jobs and services. Witness this from George Will's column on the issue:

This suburb, contiguous with Chicago's western edge, is 88 percent white. A large majority of the customers of the Wal-Mart that sits here, less than a block outside Chicago, are from the city, and more than 90 percent of the store's customers are African American.

You can read the full column here.

Every political criticism of WM - everyone of them that I have ever heard - is a lie.

Probably had code escrow but...

[SuperKendall]

You can't have a contract that compels another company to do something forever, that's just not practical.

I would bet they did have a code escrow agreement - in the event HP decided to back out of doing the software (which they did) WalMart gets access and use of all the HP source.

The fact that Wal-Mart is shutting down operations shows exactly what use code escrow is - jack and squat. What is WalMart going to do with a bunch of hacked together HP code, without any of the people who worked on it?

Plus in general a problem with code escrow is that you can't look at the source before you take it over to see how feasible that proposition really is.