Wal-Mart Offers Up Downloadable Movies 217
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?
Security (Score:3, Insightful)
Not if it's like their stores. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Apple vs Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
This'll certainly start to change when the AppleTV comes out, though.
Link (Score:3, Insightful)
If virtual DVD cost = physical DVD cost... (Score:1, Insightful)
WalMart vs. Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not if it's like their stores. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Are you a parrot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not if it's like their stores. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Security (Score:4, Insightful)
Tom
...and (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Wal*Mart doesn't have the right competencies (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Security (Score:1, Insightful)
Business Strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Are you a parrot (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple dominance? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Are you a parrot (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
It Might be worth it. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Security (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Security (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
From TV (as in the programming) I'm looking for humour, drama, stuff that makes you think (yeah I know
Put it another way, if you can't watch the shows you like watching in grayscale (black and white), chances are you like the shows you like for reasons other than their story, artistic value, etc. Shite programming in HD is shite programming just the same. It just costs more to consume it.
Not saying there is no place for HD, I'm saying it doesn't *make* the show.
Image Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Security (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Are you a parrot (Score:1, Insightful)
When I exited the military, my kids were six and seven. I got a decent job in the DC area so we moved here. Things are expensive here and until I could get established and promoted at work, my wife had to get a job. We have no relatives or friends within several hundred miles of us and day care was too expensive. You know what we did? My wife worked at a nearby 711 during the night shift and I did side IT work for local businesses. The pay sucked but it helped make ends meet. She was a dedicated and responsible employee and because of that, was given some flexibility on nights she was scheduled to work but I could not make it home (I travled a lot for my full time job). Eventually she took the jump and got a job at a local chip fab making a lot more money but she still had to request night shift because of the kids. Same thing, if in the chance I could not make it home, she was able to work that out with her supervisors. If you are a good and dedicated employee and communicate with your co workers and supervisors, you WILL BE given some flexibility. Once my kids hit 10 and 11 and we felt comfortable giving them keys to the house, my wife was able to get a regular day job but still had to deal with medical appointments and picking the kids up from school when sick etc.. Again, if you are dedicated, you will be given some slack. Now my kids are 15 and 16, I've progressed through the IT chain and make about three times what I did back when this started in 1998 and my wife has gone to school and now is now a licensed insurance agent making very good money and on track to start her own insurance agency.
It CAN be done but you may have to take some sacrifices and consessions along the way. If you are a dedicated and responsible hard working person, the good fruit will eventually come your way. If you are a slacker and looking for special treatment or would like to blame others for your shortcomings, you too will get what you deserve.
I don't think my wife has ever called in sick for work in 20 years or working and I average about once instance every 2 years.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would anyone use these services? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Not if it's like their stores. (Score:3, Insightful)
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'.
Re:Security (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [theinquirer.net], 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 [riaa.com] that it's a lot, but in my experience, whenever a company is being secretive [arstechnica.com] about their pricing, I've found that something fishy [techspot.com] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [techdirt.com] with something. And it sucks for them. Bye-bye amusement park profits. Hello market price. But back to this