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?
Re:Not if it's like their stores. (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you a parrot (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Security (Score:5, Interesting)
The service doesn't have to draw customers (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you a Wal-Mart manager? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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 $2.99. They'll be looking for the stuff that Wal-Mart truly sucks at, stuff like, as you mentioned, ease of use and selection.
Well hell then, let's all get into the movie download business, since it's so cheap! You're forgetting the cost of developing and maintaining the software, marketing, and guaranteeing a certain level of service and uptime. These kinds of things are not cheap. If Wal-Mart takes their typical attitude of trying to do it on the cheap, you'll have software that is excruciatingly painful to use, lots of system down time due to back-end hardware and software issues, non-existent customer service and support for the mass of e-mail complaints that will pour in, and other such problems.
I don't propose anything different. I'm with you on this, let them compete in the ma
Re:Not if it's like their stores. (Score:2, Interesting)
Wal-Mart you say? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Not if it's like their stores. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Security (Score:1, Interesting)
Now that I think about it, I don't think anyone in my family has bought a cd or a download in at least 3 years. Probably the same with people using video subscriptions.
Re:Not if it's like their stores. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, such scenario would never see the light of day for the simple reason that dedicated teams would pop out and buy movies and redistribute them for free (or ultra cheap). I can pay 6$ 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:Security (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Link (Score:3, Interesting)
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.