Wal-Mart Closes Movie Download Service

[Bosunsfate]

It's like the Clash of the Titans. Not often you see Walmart take one to the chops but if anyone could do it it's Apple.

I must agree that it is nice to see Walmart fail at something.

I watched a friend of mine for 30 minutes try to buy a movie through amazon and play it on their windows media center pc.. went home and rented my movie through my cable service, 10 seconds. until apple or any company makes it easier and cheaper with more selection, you just won't win.

Two things with this that I agree on. It needs to be easier to download content. I fully expect that the AppleTV will have a similar ability like the iPhone does for buying TV and movies. I think the trick is how to make it easy with such a simple remote. Just try and search for a YouTube video and you'll understand why its not been released already.

Second, download speeds need to get faster soon. Unfortunately this is not within the control of Apple. The ISP companies have just been dragging on this forever. We need simple and cheap access to over 5mb download speeds at least.

 

[Random Ping]

From what I understand, Verizon does the same with music you purchase for your phone.

From the Verizon FAQ:

Q: I have purchased and downloaded a song to my phone from the V CAST Music mobile catalog and saved it to my memory card. Can I take that memory card and play it on another phone?

A: No. The license for V CAST Music files purchased and downloaded directly to the phone resides on the phone that it was loaded to. Therefore, the song will not play on another phone.

Also, from an ars technical article on this topic:

In order to obtain distribution agreements with all of the major players, and to protect the sale of physical goods like DVDs, Wal-Mart allowed the studios to dictate the pricing model. New releases were priced equally with the physical DVDs and the content was all heavily encumbered with (Windows-only) DRM that prevented playback on more than one computer.
...
The message here is very clear: draconian DRM and unrealistic pricing are turning consumers away from legitimate retail channels and giving them a big incentive to adopt underground file sharing.

The major media organizations, while pretending to embrace the Internet, are essentially just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Until they stop treating their customers like criminals and accept that they might have to face lower per-unit sales costs they are just blindly holding on to a dying business model.

 

[carlgo]

Another Walmart venture that has failed! Keep 'em coming.

But, what will we do with all the empty and abandoned Walmart buildings? Fill up all the landfills? Make them into condos? Affordable housing as 2000 families can fit in one building? Use them as informational sites so students can be bussed out to see the evil created by corporate greed combined with child labor? How about detention centers for terrorists? Keeping them in a Walmart is torture, but without the baggage of traditional torture centers. Even the most hardened terrorist will vote Republican after two months of detention.

 

[Buran]

Do ANY of these services caption movies?

I don't use even iTunes video because I'm hard of hearing and REQUIRE captions. I know there's an option now for "show captions", but do any of the offerings in iTunes actually support this?

Right now I can get captions on DVD, pay $15 or less, watch as many times as I want on any player I want, including my TV.

What do online services have to offer me that is something I can actually use?

 

[whatever]

My biggest beef about TV (which I absolutely love, by the way) is that I cannot use it to download new content such as songs, TV shows, and podcasts. I have to do that at my workstation right now.

I hope Apple adds a content browser and download capability to TV in future updates.

I agree 100%. I figure that must be coming, since you can do that with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

One of my friends got an Apple TV for Christmas and her question to me is once she syncs a movie from iTunes to her Apple TV, can she delete it? And can you sync movies from Apple TV back to iTunes. I haven't tried this myself (I stream my movies onto Apple TV), but has anyone else.

I still rank Apple TV as one of the coolest products of 2007.

 

[theBB]

So another example of DRM screwing consumers. If you bought a movie, when you upgrade your computer you will no longer be able to watch your movie. This sucks big time.

I started using iTunes long before I had a digital music player. iTunes provided a lot of attractions:

1) I could buy only one song from an album and save money if I think the rest of the album is not worth having. That is a big advantage over the then current CD technology.

2) I could burn songs on a CD, so I don't get locked up into one company's hardware.

3) If Apple abandoned the service one day, I could still listen to them as they can be burned on a CD.

Wal-Mart's service did not provide the last item and now worst case scenario happens, so the purchased movies are fading away. A rental model gets rid of this worry, as you would not care what happens to the service provider in a year. You'll just watch the movie tonight.

Still, even if iTunes provides rentals, I don't see this service taking off as quickly the music store. The hardware lock will stay, so you'd need an iPod or aTV, all of which are more expensive than a DVD player. You could use a computer, but that is not as convenient as a DVD player. The advantage over DVDs is not large, either. Depending on the price, either it will be faster than Netflix or cheaper than walking into a Blockbuster. I already have an AppleTV, so I'd probably use it, but for most consumers it is hard to make a case. Once HD-DVD vs. BluRay battle gets decided, it is much easier to convince somebody to buy one of those players than an TV. It makes sense for iPod owners if they want to watch a movie on the plane or train, but that's about it.

 

[cdinca]

4. Now, if I was Apple I would buy TiVo, just for the name. I would then add TiVo support to the Apple TV and flip NBC the bird! I really wish Apple would buy TiVo, I used to think my DVR was cool, then I saw a TiVo and I have to say TiVo is so much better!

5. Since Apple already has all of the pieces of the puzzle to do everything that a Slingbox can do already (all they have to do is put the pieces together) and the average person doesn't even know what a Slingbox is, buying them would be a giant waste of money! Again I would buy Tivo!

I would love this

 

[audioruckus]

I guess Wal-Mart couldn't keep up after all. Who's next, Amazon?

Not for nothing, but the Amazon MP3 download service is really good. It intergrates into iTunes with ease, and everything is DRM free and high quality. It has more DRM free stuff than iTunes does as well.

I still use the iTunes Music store to search for music, since I have yet to find a better online music service that is as easy and fun to navigate as iTunes, but when I find something I like, I always hop over to Amazon.com to see if I can buy it there first.

I love Apple, but Amazon.com has made a convert of me in terms of buying music.

 

[hscottm]

I think this is genius. This is like the tried-and-true upsell. If someone has already paid $5 to rent the movie, offering them just another $5-$10 to buy the movie would definitely be more 'psychologically' attractive and entice more people to buy the movie if they liked it.

some of you may be too young to realize there was something similar in play around time of the birth of the DVD. It was called DIVX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX).

The difference was that Circuit City and some law firm decided it would be easier to get rich upselling purchases this way. Basically you could buy cheapo "rental" discs ($4 for 48 hours) and then the player would let you upgrade, or Divx GOLD discs which were unlimited play (I dont think any were ever released though).

It failed - quickly, in like 6 mos - for a few reasons:

1) backlash - privacy issues with the hardware players "calling home" to report, encouraging people that after viewing the discs, they could be thrown away
2) arguments that given the same capacity and bandwidth on a DVD, the DIVX picture was inferior (not sure that was proven)
3) lack of adoption. CC was the only store selling them, and most people chose DVD instead.
4) cost of hardware - there were relatively few DIVX players (all sold at CC), and they were a little more expensive.

Anyway I agree with the digital rent / upsell-buy idea but wanted to point out some relevant history in the digital video domain. The reason I think its so interesting is that it was somewhat of a format war too - there were studios that originally released only in Divx (eg Dreamworks) and not DVD. I think we see the same things happening in digital rentals/purchases.

There are some issues related to all of this still relevant today. Namely that the rental/buy/etc market for movies for non-traditional methods (traditional meaning the studio sells you a $15 DVD) is still a mess, mostly because the studios want as much money as possible. What I remain unable to understand is how a studio doesnt see why $10 of pure profit from a download is worse than a $20 MSRP on a DVD that Best Buy sells for $12 (meaning the studio cant be getting much different than $10 for after shipping/etc). AND why a $4 rental (again, pure profit) to someone who had no intention of buying the DVD isnt a good deal either.

 

[kresh]

I'm not going to directly quote anyone, but why do people translate their own personal feelings into an absolute truth for the rest of mankind? A statement saying that "nobody wants to buy a movie for $15.00 that's sub-DVD quality" is a personal opinion.

I've bought almost 40 movies from iTunes. A few were $14.99, some were $12.99, and most were $9.99. Others in my family buy movies from iTunes as do several of my friends. Our only commonality, other than Macs, are our AppleTV's. To say no one is doing so is misleading.

Has anyone paid any attention to the actual iTunes video sales figures? Daniel Eran Dilger does a wonderful job extracting the truth from all the noise when it comes to video downloads.

Apple owns 42% of paid movie downloads and 99% of paid TV episode downloads. How does this translate to "No one is going to buy and download sub-DVD quality movies"?

 

[inkswamp]

Good. I don't even care how it relates to or affects Apple either. Any time Wal-Mart fails, it's a win for the rest of us. I despise that place, and any time they get their butt handed to them is a good day.

 

[inkswamp]

Not for nothing, but the Amazon MP3 download service is really good. It intergrates into iTunes with ease, and everything is DRM free and high quality. It has more DRM free stuff than iTunes does as well.

Except Amazon fails miserably in one area that Apple has time and time again shown to be a critical thing for customers: user interface. The Amazon interface for buying music sucks out loud. I can't tolerate it. It's one of the worst music browsing experiences I've ever had and that says a lot when you've got abhorrently bad designs out there like Rhapsody (gah... don't even get me started on that whole stupid floating playlist window thing. What an awful UI.)

Amazon's interface problems are twofold. 1) they have lots of non audio download products scattered all over the margins of the pages which, I think, overwhelms the average consumer. They're just looking for music downloads, not books or software or god-knows-what-else; 2) the browsing process is just flat-out badly designed and clunky to use. If you think that doesn't matter, you have never sat down with a non-tech-savvy person. Those are the bulk of the consumers out there and I've watched people like my own wife browse through iTunes and have lots of fun doing it while stumbling and giving up on other online shopping experiences with bad UIs. It really does matter and Amazon botched that.

 

[CWallace]

It should be noted that HP pulled the plug on the back-end, but if Wal-Mart found value in the program, they could have continued it with someone else. That they didn't implies they don't find value in it.

Quite frankly, rentals appeal to the studios (video and audio) more then sales because their "holy grail" goal is to get you to pay everytime you access the content. That way, they have a constant revenue stream and the return on investment lasts much longer since even if you don't listen to a song for years, when you do, they can get paid for it.

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3)

I think this comes down too the fact that consumers don't want to own movies digitally, but want to rent. Plus there has to be an easy way for the movies to get from your PC to your TV. Otherwise, this is too complex for most people.

If Apple can enhance AppleTV and give us a good rental service, I think we'll finally have something to get excited about.

I agree. The content needs to be full HD though.

 

[mattvolp]

Sales

Does anybody know how many people we're subscribed with their program/how much revenue came from it?

 

[Beefeater]

Walmart had a movie download service?

 

[tuneman07]

Originally Posted by sushi View Post
I think that the best solution is a combination of rent and own. This way you can purchase a movie outright if you want it. Or you can rent the movie for a cheaper price for a limited viewing time.

But here is what would really a nice addition. To have the option of purchasing movie outright after you have rented it. You would only need to pay the difference between the rental fee and the purchase fee. So if the movie costs $5.99 to rent and $14.99 to own, you would pay the rental fee of $5.99 up front, and then if you decide to purchase the movie you would be charged an additional $9.00 to cover the

Blockbuster is already doing this- Every game I have bought for the past 2 or 3 years since Blockbuster has had the "no late fees" thing has been from Blockbuster. You pay 6 bucks to rent a game, and if you don't return it within 7 days they charge you 1.25$ and you can keep it for another 3 weeks. Sometime in that 3 week period they auto charge the cost of the game to your card. The amazing thing is they don't just deduct the cost of the rental (6 bucks) they actually give you a cheaper price- Most games are about 30 dollars for the xbox 360 and Wii. This makes a grand total of 37.25 dollars for an Xbox360/Wii game which is a good 20 or so bucks cheaper at least than the store. Pure genius if you ask me and great way for them to stay relevant in a world of internet/digital download everything.

 

[benpatient]

i don't know...i didn't even know that walmart was doing this to being with. Maybe if they spent as much on TV commercials as Apple does...

it's funny, I got an xbox 360 this weekend because I'm tired of waiting for (i know it sounds crazy, but i swear it makes sense!) the new Mac Pro....

I signed up for Xbox Live and saw that they have movies and TVs shows and stuff. I didn't know this. And then I saw that a lot of the things on there were in HD for a bigger charge (still less than 5 bucks in real money). They've got Ratatouille in HD for under 500 "MS points" and it is a 2-3 week rental...can't remember when it said it expired. I don't have an HD player, but I have an HD-TV hooked up in 1080p to a 360, so all of the sudden, for 1 dollar more than blockbuster, I can rent an HD movie for a couple of weeks instead of days. And from what I can tell, you don't have to leave it on your hard drive...download when you want, and delete, but as long as you're still in the rental period, you can download again.

They have a bunch of old movies on there, too. Pleasantville is 240 credits for a "rental" that expires in 2014 AD! That's basically 3 bucks for 7 years of "ownership."

It isn't a perfect system or a perfect model, but i've already spent money on it, and I haven't bought any videos of any type from iTMS yet despite owning an iPod video and a bunch of Macs and having 150gb of Apple Lossless music on an external hard drive.

The funny thing is, I presume all of that stuff on XBL is copy protected at the moment, but I didn't even think about it until now, and I certainly didn't notice anything interfering with my experience. I guess I find the video functionality of the ipod to be a gimmick. Just a way for Apple to sell me more stuff. I notice a lot of people talking about how they don't want to watch TV on a computer, so they want to get an AppleTV...

Well, I don't want to watch TV on a 2.5 inch screen. Ever. I have one that is capable, and I can't see the point. I want everything to be in HD and huge. I can't help but think that probably most people want something similar, because there are a LOT of big screen TVs going out the doors of electronics stores.

People who claim they can't tell enough of a difference to want HD programming have never seen real HD programming. Going to Wal Mart and looking at 100 TVs under fluorescent lamps with their brightness and contrast at 100% and a ratty HD-Lite loop of content playing on them that is being split and amplified and attenuated 100 different ways from a single source device is not HD programming. Apple's "almost DVD" purchases are of sub-par quality. They are marginally better than hulu's streaming video feeds (the SD ones, not the HD ones!). They look like SD digital cable that is being highly-compressed when you watch them through an AppleTV at an Apple Store. Sure they look good on an ipod, but I don't watch TV in my car or at my office or while I'm jogging. I watch TV on the couch or in the bedroom. Walmart's video service was probably junk. I didn't know it existed. The truth is that Apple's video service is only marginally better. If it were being asked to justify its own existence by being profitable, or even by bringing in hardware sales, it would have been closed already, too. Apple is sticking it out because they want to be there when the corner turns...Right now, as a fairly big media consumer, I'm very unimpressed with Apple's video offerings. I am certainly not willing to pay for what is currently available.

 

[seashellz2]

I see Amazon has kicked the price of a song from $.89 to $.99 cents-
Was 89 cents a teaser/starter rate, or is the service floundering, so they had to raise the price?

Would be nice to see a progress report on the Zoon ® and Amazons new book gadget...
---
>>Keeping them in a Walmart is torture, but without the baggage of traditional torture centers.

had I not seen an official Army training film on waterboarding (horrible) I might have also suggested a visit to Wal Mart as the worst form of torture
for 'terrorists'

(Anyone seen the recent Bhuto interview on David Frost (Youtube) before her death where she stated that a Shiek Omar murdered Osama Bin Ladden 3 years ago-yet we still keep gettting these bad central casting Bin Ladden tapes rolled out for us every so often-put on greasepaint, a fake beard and a turban and Viola! a do-it yourself OBL) I was already kind of suspicious of these.

 

[villainx]

Aside from making sure the downloaded video is of as high of quality as possible.

And make sure there are options to include the extras and commentaries and etc.

The model, as already mentioned, that has legs is either straight rental or rent with buy option.

But I don't see why no one has this spin: let the service provider be the one storing the files; or basically make the movies download as needed into a customer's account. This way one can buy or own like a hundred movies, and a lot of people easily have that many DVDs, and not have the hassle of the hard drive upgrades and so forth.

I guess this is sort of like a subscription service. Though the difference is that the customer actually owns the movie. Maybe some premium for third party storage or monthly storage charges. I also do not see/understand how more or less convenient it is for Apple or Amazon or whoever to be the place where the file is stored.

 

[benpatient]

Except Amazon fails miserably in one area that Apple has time and time again shown to be a critical thing for customers: user interface. The Amazon interface for buying music sucks out loud. I can't tolerate it. It's one of the worst music browsing experiences I've ever had and that says a lot when you've got abhorrently bad designs out there like Rhapsody (gah... don't even get me started on that whole stupid floating playlist window thing. What an awful UI.)

Amazon's interface problems are twofold. 1) they have lots of non audio download products scattered all over the margins of the pages which, I think, overwhelms the average consumer. They're just looking for music downloads, not books or software or god-knows-what-else; 2) the browsing process is just flat-out badly designed and clunky to use. If you think that doesn't matter, you have never sat down with a non-tech-savvy person. Those are the bulk of the consumers out there and I've watched people like my own wife browse through iTunes and have lots of fun doing it while stumbling and giving up on other online shopping experiences with bad UIs. It really does matter and Amazon botched that.

Actually, I completely 100% disagree. I found Amazon's mp3 store interface to be easy to use and simple to understand. In fact, i was buying things a little TOO easily and I got nervous. The music previewing system for MP3-available albums is perfect. I love being able to listen to all of the 30-second previews with one click, or listening to an individual one if I want to. I already had 1-click checkout enabled on my amazon account, so after the 1-time download for the itunes-integrator application, I was ready to roll. Click, click, and a song/album is downloaded and goes automatically into itunes, just like with the iTMS.

I like seeing the physical product on the digital product pages, because it lets me see if the digital product is a good value for a particular album. It works both ways, as well. Amazon's CD entry for an album will have the "also available as mp3 download right now" link on valid items. Now that includes every major label except Sony, and LOTs of indie labels, too. If I go to look for a CD on amazon and think I might want to order it, but there is a link right there in the product info for the 4-dollars-cheaper digital version of the same album, I just might get that instead. I like the option. I like that some albums are 5.99. I like that some tracks are less than 90 cents. It is a very good system and I can't help but think you haven't actually used it, but are just nay-saying out of habitual defense of Apple. Your comments don't match up with what I and other people I know have experienced with the amazon mp3 store. It is fast, easy, and functional. I find the iTMS interface to be a bit clunky compared to Amazon's system, honestly. Amazon has a lot of "smart" custom metadata links between products. It suggests alternative spellings if you search for someone whose name is not always spelled the same way (Tchaikovsky, anyone?), or if the content provider has made a link between their product and another product, related searches will return those results as well if there isn't enough useful material in the direct search results. It is...robust.

 

[benpatient]

But I don't see why no one has this spin: let the service provider be the one storing the files; or basically make the movies download as needed into a customer's account. This way one can buy or own like a hundred movies, and a lot of people easily have that many DVDs, and not have the hassle of the hard drive upgrades and so forth.

I guess this is sort of like a subscription service. Though the difference is that the customer actually owns the movie. Maybe some premium for third party storage or monthly storage charges. I also do not see/understand how more or less convenient it is for Apple or Amazon or whoever to be the place where the file is stored.

XBox Live Video:

• Your "purchased" TV/movie programs can be downloaded an infinite amount of times to an infinite amount of consoles provided you are still within the "rental period"; you may also play them back on friends' 360s with your removable drive.
• Deleted HD items can be re-downloaded in either HDTV or SD.
• Some movies are 24 hour rentals, some are 2-3 weeks, some are 7+ years. This is effectively "buying" the movie and storing it on MS's servers...exactly what you're describing.

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3)

Does anyone else find it funny that Walmart sells iPods yet their movie downloads weren't playable on the iPod. I don't think you can even play the songs from Walmart's music store on the iPod.

 

[seedster2]

i don't know...i didn't even know that walmart was doing this to being with. Maybe if they spent as much on TV commercials as Apple does...

it's funny, I got an xbox 360 this weekend because I'm tired of waiting for (i know it sounds crazy, but i swear it makes sense!) the new Mac Pro....

I signed up for Xbox Live and saw that they have movies and TVs shows and stuff. I didn't know this. And then I saw that a lot of the things on there were in HD for a bigger charge (still less than 5 bucks in real money). They've got Ratatouille in HD for under 500 "MS points" and it is a 2-3 week rental...can't remember when it said it expired. I don't have an HD player, but I have an HD-TV hooked up in 1080p to a 360, so all of the sudden, for 1 dollar more than blockbuster, I can rent an HD movie for a couple of weeks instead of days. And from what I can tell, you don't have to leave it on your hard drive...download when you want, and delete, but as long as you're still in the rental period, you can download again.

They have a bunch of old movies on there, too. Pleasantville is 240 credits for a "rental" that expires in 2014 AD! That's basically 3 bucks for 7 years of "ownership."

It isn't a perfect system or a perfect model, but i've already spent money on it, and I haven't bought any videos of any type from iTMS yet despite owning an iPod video and a bunch of Macs and having 150gb of Apple Lossless music on an external hard drive.

The funny thing is, I presume all of that stuff on XBL is copy protected at the moment, but I didn't even think about it until now, and I certainly didn't notice anything interfering with my experience. I guess I find the video functionality of the ipod to be a gimmick. Just a way for Apple to sell me more stuff. I notice a lot of people talking about how they don't want to watch TV on a computer, so they want to get an AppleTV...

Well, I don't want to watch TV on a 2.5 inch screen. Ever. I have one that is capable, and I can't see the point. I want everything to be in HD and huge. I can't help but think that probably most people want something similar, because there are a LOT of big screen TVs going out the doors of electronics stores.

People who claim they can't tell enough of a difference to want HD programming have never seen real HD programming. Going to Wal Mart and looking at 100 TVs under fluorescent lamps with their brightness and contrast at 100% and a ratty HD-Lite loop of content playing on them that is being split and amplified and attenuated 100 different ways from a single source device is not HD programming. Apple's "almost DVD" purchases are of sub-par quality. They are marginally better than hulu's streaming video feeds (the SD ones, not the HD ones!). They look like SD digital cable that is being highly-compressed when you watch them through an AppleTV at an Apple Store. Sure they look good on an ipod, but I don't watch TV in my car or at my office or while I'm jogging. I watch TV on the couch or in the bedroom. Walmart's video service was probably junk. I didn't know it existed. The truth is that Apple's video service is only marginally better. If it were being asked to justify its own existence by being profitable, or even by bringing in hardware sales, it would have been closed already, too. Apple is sticking it out because they want to be there when the corner turns...Right now, as a fairly big media consumer, I'm very unimpressed with Apple's video offerings. I am certainly not willing to pay for what is currently available.

Great response.

I have an iphone and while I watch some short shows here and there on the Acela, I would never consider it a great tool for watching a movie.

Unless Apple does things dramatically better than Walmart and adopts some of the approaches that XBL and PS3 leverage, they will experience a similar failure. It will likely go unnoticed as itunes is really just there to sell music and ipods.

TV is a bust. Standard definition when people are in a 1080p market???? In order for this venture to be successful they will need to upgrade their hardware so it appeals to a niche market that they will be catering to.

 

[seashellz2]

Heres the dealbreaker:
---
DAD: Childs MP3 came loaded with porn

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. (AP Dec 26) A father gave his 10-year-old daughter a Christmas present that would make Santa blush.

Now Daryl Hill wants to know why an MP3 video player he bought at a Wal-Mart in Sparta was preloaded with pornography and explicit songs.

Hill bought three of the players as Christmas presents for his children. He said one of the devices had apparently been returned to the store from a previous owner who loaded sex clips and songs with lyrics about using drugs.

"Within 10 minutes, my daughter was crying," Hill said Thursday. "I wish I could take the thoughts and images out of her head."

Hill questioned why Wal-Mart Stores Inc. would sell used merchandise as new, which he said violates its own policies.

A company spokesman said in an e-mail to WSMV-TV of Nashville that stores are not supposed to return opened packages to the sales floor and that the matter was under investigation.

Hill said he declined Wal-Mart's offer to replace the MP3 player. He said he has already bought his daughter a new one and is hanging onto the controversial one until he talks to a lawyer.