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Wal-Mart Closes Online Movie Download Service

Posted by Zonk on from the hard-to-fight-the-flix dept.

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?"

1 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Squished? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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.