Wal-Mart Can’t Compete With Netflix, Kills Video Downloads

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First Wal-Mart killed their DVD rental service, and now they’ve shuttered their video download site – prior to it even graduating from beta. Wal-Mart’s eight online customers probably aren’t too upset as they can still: play your videos as many times as you wish on the computer you used to download the videos.

I wasn’t very impressed with the service offering back in February, especially in light of Netflix’s streaming capabilities and the more favorable download terms offered by Amazon Unbox: re-download any of your purchased Unbox videos.

At the end of the day, though, most of us prefer to watch video on a television screen. And it’s yet to be seen which solutions will win out… Not to mention, we still don’t know what hardware Netflix is bringing to the table and at what price.

11 thoughts on “Wal-Mart Can’t Compete With Netflix, Kills Video Downloads”

  1. By the way, is it just me, or is something about Wal-Mart’s suggestion amusing:

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  4. James, If Wal-Mart was interested in continuing to offer video downloads, they would either roll their own or outsource to another vendor. Which is why I didn’t bother hitting the HP angle…

    Though I do wonder what it means for HP’s media extender/connected HDTVs. Sounds like they’re migrating away from their own tech and will be licensing Windows Vista extender functionality going forward. We’ll probably hear more about this at CES.

  5. Wal-Mart shoppers need to be prompted to “never return to our failure site”.

    Now if there’s just a way to get the XVID to the TV…

  6. “Now if there’s just a way to get the XVID to the TV…”

    Xbox 360, SageTV HD Extender, those new Linksys extenders, SlingCatcher (coming soon) to name a few… :)

  9. Amazon Unbox looks great on my HDTV via my S3 Tivo. So does Xvid (and anything else FFMPEG will transcode) via PyTivo!

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