Wal-Mart Abandons Online Movie Downloads
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The retreat for Wal-Mart follows the companyâs 2005 decision to abandon efforts to build an online DVD rental service.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is edging into selling video downloads by offering buyers of the "Superman Returns" DVD a chance to buy downloads of the same movie, beginning Wednesday.
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The retailer turns its download service, which accounts for roughly 40 percent of all DVD sales, over to Netflix after its software provider, Hewlett-Packard, discontinues its own merchant-store service.
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Following in the footsteps of Netflix and Best Buy publicly siding with Blu-ray in the next-generation DVD format war, Wal-Mart announced Friday it will no longer be stocking HD DVD players or movies by June.
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Goldman cuts No. 1 retailer&#39;s rating to &quot;in-line&quot; from &quot;outperform&quot; on heels of weak November sales. NEW YORK  - Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world&#39;s biggest retailer, suffered another blow to its star
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A popular peer-to-peer file-sharing website has closed down amid mounting efforts by the movie industry to crack down on online piracy.
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The world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart, is set to open its long-awaited online movie download store on Tuesday.
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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 .
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A web site known as a BitTorrent tracker, popular among fans of peer-to-peer networking, has closed down for good, apparently the result of the movie industry cracking down on the illegal sharing of copyrighted material over the internet.
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(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.
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Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. retailer, on Friday said it would phase out the sales of HD DVD offerings and exclusively offer high-definition Blu-ray hardware and DVDs by the middle of this year.The decision was based on U.S. customers&#39; preference for Blu-ray movies and hardware in purchases, Wal-Mart said in a statement.The retailer will phase out HD DVD offerings in Wal-Mart and Sam&#39;s Clubs retail stores, as well as online offerings, by June, the company said.Wal-Mart&#39;s rejection of HD DVD is a sign that Blu-ray is catching on with retailers. Best Buy earlier this week said it would recommend users to buy Blu-ray products, though it would continue offering HD DVD products. Movie rental chains Netflix and Blockbuster recently abandoned HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray DVD offerings.Six of eight major movie studios publish Blu-ray DVDs, including Walt Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Sony, and Warner Bros. Only two major movie studios, Paramount Home Entertainment and Universal Studios Home Entertainment, publish in the HD DVD format.The Blu-ray format has also seen a spate of victories in the gaming and consumer electronics industries with companies like Philips adopting the format over HD DVD.Blu-ray supporters include Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung, while Toshiba, Microsoft, and Intel are among the companies supporting HD DVD.
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InfoWorld - Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. retailer, on Friday said it would phase out the sales of HD DVD offerings and exclusively offer high-definition Blu-ray hardware and DVDs by the middle of this year.
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A legal campaign against sites that help people share films online appears to have forced a popular site to close.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is ending its loss-generating business in Germany just two months after leaving South Korea in what analysts welcomed as a move to focus resources on expanding in more profitable international markets like China and Latin America.
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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.
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Online retailers don't own Mondays anymore.
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That bouncing smiley-face thing over at Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) is at it again -- this time the little critter is rolling back the cost of the Arkansas retailer&#39;s online DVD rental program.