WalMart Movie Downloads

September 16th, 2006

Now WalMart is supposedly getting into the movie download game. I’m sure they will try to compete with Amazon and Apple on price. It remains to be seen however if the movies are DRMed to heck (most likely). One hopes the selection is much better than what I’ve seen on Amazon Unbox and the Apple iTunes store.

However, even if by some miracle the offerings are incredible, I wonder if WalMart has enough customers in the movie download demographic to support this service. Personally, on principle alone I strongly avoid shopping at WalMart because of their big-box mentality. Second, it’s known that most people who shop at WalMart live in rural areas where broadband penetration isn’t high. Downloading a huge file over a dial-up modem could literally take days.

The other side to this, however, is that both Amazon and WalMart sell tons of DVDs. Part of me wonders if the whole movie download thing is kind of a loss-leader type strategy, where internet users come to the site to check out the download service, decide it sucks, and then since they’re right there on Amazon or WalMart’s website, opt for the DVD sale instead. If so, that’s one disadvantage for Apple.

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