Fair Use News & Views

Wal-Mart has quietly shut down its service for downloading movies. The announcement went unnoticed for almost a week, which certainly speaks to how popular it was. A couple of big companies like Wal-Mart and HP (who supplied the delivery infrastructure) might have been able to figure out that the product offering was DOA from the start. Let’s list the reasons:

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  • Operated on a single PC
  • Windows only
  • Price of $13-$20 per movie
  • High speed connection mandatory
  • Played only on Window Media Players (no iPods)
  • Do it yourself connection to a TV

Henry (”Amazon Will Go to $600″) Blodgett lists a lot of smart sounding reasons about branding, etc. to explain why this failed. Any 16-year-old kid could explain it more simply: It was just plain stupid. Any of the reasons above would have spelled trouble; together they were a perfect storm of cluelessness. A service like this is an ALTERNATIVE to buying or renting DVDs. A bad alternative will never be used.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Identity & Fair Use. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.