According to Engadget and a lot of other folks, WalMart will announce later today that it will be offering legal movie downloads from all six movie studios. This is supposed to be a big deal because the industry’s leader, Apple and iTunes, currently only offers movies from two of those studios, one of which just happens to be part-owned by Apple’s CEO.
Here’s my question: is anyone supposed to care?
Two moments immediately spring to mind. The first comes from late 2006 when Apple was rumored to be launching a movie download service and Amazon beat them to the punch by a few days with its “Unbox” service – a fact that all three current Unbox users are proud of. The other comes from a few years back when WalMart itself first entered the music download business. I remember giving it a try just for comparison’s sake, and it was such a horribly crappy user experience that it was essentially unusauble…and by all accounts remains so today, at least for the service’s seven active users.
From the latter I can surmise that WalMart has absolutely no idea how to offer up a usable media download experience, meaning that whatever the company rolls out today will be tried by a few, panned by them all, and shunned by the masses. From the former I get the feeling that no one’s going to much care about it anyway. This is Apple’s game and Apple’s alone, at least for the foreseeable future, and just because someone else rolls out some content that Apple doesn’t have isn’t going to make a difference. For the time being, the public is either going to A) download their content from Apple, B) stick to traditional disc-based media, or C) continue to download it illegally. It’s that way for music, and it’s going to be that way for movies as well.
Sorry, WalMart. You sure know how to be successful when it comes to retail, and I’ve gotta give you credit for continuing to try to push forward with content downloads even in the face of the fact that no one wants to download their content from you. But just because you’ve got a bottomless pit of money to burn on trying doesn’t mean you’re ever going to succeed.
I suppose there’s some miniscule chance that WalMart blows us away today with a movie download service that’s actually, you know, usable. But I think it’s a pretty safe bet to go ahead and put WalMart’s movie download service on the same shelf as the Microsoft Zune: too late to matter and too crappy to even carve a niche.
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