Wal-Mart movie download farce
p2pnet.net News:- Why would anyone want to waste good money (about $13 and $20) to download a DVD on the day of release when they could zoom on over to the local rental store and get it for a few dollars?
And we won’t even mention the p2p networks.
But Hollywood and Wal-Mart figure you’ll be stupid enough to do exactly that, also paying close to eight bucks for an old movie and $2 per episode for TV shows.
That’s the ‘deal’ under the new partnership between Wal-Mart the Big Six Hollywood studios, Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal on www.walmart.com/videodownloads.
This, “plunges Wal-Mart into competition with several established sites, like Amazon.com, CinemaNow and iTunes, and given the chain’s penchant for price cutting, could drive down the cost of a digital download,” says The New York Times.
It would have to, and very considerably if it hopes to attract surfers.
“Wal-Mart says it has used its clout to pull together all the right Hollywood players, create an easy-to-use Web site with Hewlett-Packard and develop a broad library of videos,” says the story.
Wal-Mart will have access to films such ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ and TV series like 24 and Veronica Mars.
Yes. Well ……
Meanwhile, let’s hope the service functions a little more efficiently than the web site. When we went for a look at 8:13 am PST, the pic on the upper right shows you what we saw after three attempts and 15 minutes waiting for the page to finish downloading.
Also See:
The New York Times – Wal-Mart and Studios in Film Deal, February 6, 2007
Want to subscribe to p2pnet by email with Feedburner? Just click here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use our own p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
It works in IE
February 6th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Works in Firefox 2.0 also, as long as you’re patient and do a complete reload. I think I finally got a readable page on the 3rd or 4th reload, but even the account setup page initially gave me the garbled version. Beta site indeed.
February 6th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
then wal-mart will send all the other competition out and the MPAA into china!
February 8th, 2007 at 11:24 am
you will need the activeX plugin for it to work on Firefox… it works great on IE though and the download program seems nifty too