Wal-Mart disputes report on movie download deal
22388
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Friday said   it was not trying to dissuade movie studios from working with   other forms of distribution, such as Apple Computer Inc.'s   iTunes download service.
200857
Wal-Mart Stores Inc  quietly  canceled its online video download service less than a year  after the site went live, a company spokeswoman said on  Thursday.
147075
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.,  already the nation's top seller of DVDs, said Tuesday that it  has become the first major retailer to offer a digital download  service that will feature movies from all the major studios.
55683
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which promotes itself as a seller of clean music, deceived customers by stocking compact discs by the rock group Evanescence that contain the f-word, a lawsuit claims.
713423
LOS ANGELES -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has launched its long-awaited online movie download store, entering a market that has yet to catch on with consumers but is expected to grow rapidly.
4436
Video rental leader Blockbuster cut the price of its online service Wednesday, the latest shot in an escalating price war with Netflix and Wal-Mart.
677245
Wal-Mart lowers the bar in the online movie rental war by slashing prices on its basic rental service.
397514
Wal-Mart Stores Inc has decided to  exclusively sell high-definition DVDs in the Blu-Ray format,  dealing what could be a crippling blow to the rival HD DVD  technology backed by Toshiba Corp.
531049
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT.N, the  world's biggest retailer, suffered another blow to its star  status on Wednesday when a leading U.S. investment bank  downgraded the company's stock.
610845
Blockbuster Inc. is cutting the cost of its monthly online rental service, the latest salvo in a price war with Netflix Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
435339
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  said on  Friday it would push its suppliers to cut the amount of  packaging used in products sold through the world's largest  retailer, a move the company said will save it $3.4 billion.
247475
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has launched its long-awaited online movie download store, entering a market that has yet to catch on with consumers but is expected to grow rapidly.
532634
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Friday said  it was not trying to dissuade movie studios from working with  other forms of distribution, such as Apple Computer Inc.'s  iTunes download service.
602922
The New York City Comptroller on Tuesday demanded Wal-Mart Stores Inc. records dating from 2002 to determine whether the retailer performed illegal surveillance on shareholders who submitted proxy petitions.
691699
(InfoWorld) - Tapping a new service from Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart joined a growing field of providers of digital video download services with the launch of an online movie store on Tuesday. The offering is built on HP Video Merchant Services, a Web-shopping technology also launched Tuesday that allows businesses to set up an online video store. HP holds hundreds of petabytes of digital films and TV shows in its data centers and provides back-office sales and search applications, said Willem de Zoete, vice president and general manager of Digital Entertainment Services at HP. Customers like Wal-Mart use the service as part of their online retail offerings, allowing cinema fans to browse movies based on genre or search by entering the name of an actor, director, or film. Customers can then download the movies to play on their PCs or portable video players or order a packaged disc to arrive in the mail, choosing a DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray format. A first-time user must install a program on the PC before starting the 30- to 45-minute process of downloading a 1.5GB movie over a typical household broadband connection, although most can start watching within five to 10 minutes, said Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart's divisional merchandise manager for digital media. Once the movie is downloaded, each user has the right to transfer it to three separate portable media players using Microsoft's Windows Media Player and to watch it an unlimited number of times. Customers who own media extender boxes can also play the digital file on TV screens, Swint said. The service will compete against Apple's iTunes store, which is limited to movies from Disney and Paramount in addition to TV and other programs. Other video download services are available from Amazon.com, AOL, Movielink, and CinemaNow. Microsoft also offers a movie and TV download service to Xbox users. Wal-Mart claims it has a market advantage over those sites since it offers movies from most of the major Hollywood studios and television networks. Compared to conventional movie rental stores, the digital movie rental industry is still struggling to build the size of its catalogs. Wal-Mart now sells about 3,000 of the movies and TV shows stored in HP's digital vaults and expects that number to rise quickly as content providers convert their own libraries to digital versions. "Today, the majority of movies are stored on tapes in buildings. That is a choke point at this moment in time. Part of my focus is to work with Hollywood studios to make movies available in digital file formats," de Zoete said. Another bar to building larger catalogs is that many obscure movie titles are never brought to the rental market if studios think demand is too small to sell the vast quantity of discs created in bulk reproduction batches, Swint said. That also stops retailers from taking advantage of the "long tail," the marketing theory that shops can make more money selling small quantities of each niche item than selling a large amount of trendy, short-lived items. To solve it, HP plans to offer "manufacturing on demand" in the future, opening up a huge catalog of old titles by producing a single disc to meet each online order. HP has started building a factory to do that work, and will add it to their Video Merchant Services package. In the meantime, Wal-Mart is selling new releases, which become available the same day as the DVD release, for $12.88 to $19.88. Older movies cost $7.50, and TV programs cost $1.96 per episode. DVD buyers will also have the option of paying an additional fee to download the digital version for playback on PCs and portable devices.
81338
It's clearly a blow, but retailers were divided on whether the move actually amounted to a death knell to the format, which is battling Blu-Ray.
469054
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. , the world's largest retailer, unexpectedly lowered its estimate for September US comparable-store sales growth to 1.3 percent after discovering mistakes in its calculations.