Wal-Mart Movie Downloads: Why it won’t do well

Om Malik, over @ gigaom.com points out why he thinks Wal-Mart won’t do well in the Digital Movie Download (IE only) business. He makes a great case in point: Enron and its broadband push and how they thought of bandwidth like they did with energy. And he’s right, Wal-Mart has a luster that is created SOLELY by it’s low prices–low prices–that aren’t included with it’s new digital download service. The reason of course is the studios protecting their DVD sales business. I wanted to point out why I think Wal-Mart will fail.

 

1. The people who are WalMarts biggest customers are still running Windows 98. What I really mean is the folks who will bother to download a movie in the next 3 years, probably shop at Costco, or at a local market, and tend to not be big Wal-Mart customers.

 

2. Well, I pointed it out above, who wants to download a movie for more than what it costs to go buy the DVD at the store which has more features? I don’t, if I ever transfer my entire DVD collection to hard drive, I’ll do it from DVD, and I won’t buy another copy just avoid having to put a DVD in a player.

 

3. I just went to their site in firefox, they don’t even redirect you to a get IE page, boy this looks ugly, do they know that about 8 percent of customers will see this? Probably not, back to what Om said about Enron.

Tivo and Yahoo announce new service

 

Cnet has the scoop: Members of Yahoo and Tivo, are able to record TV shows from the Internet starting today, by signing into a new portal. You have to be a member of both services for it to work, and check out the Cnet article for information on latency. This is the latest in a trend of TV and Internet Convergence. Very Cool, but I use Windows MCE and I’ve already had the ability to do this for quite some time, without a monthly fee I might add.