Wal-Mart shuts down video downloads after a year in service

Sounds like the video download game isn't as easy as the biggies make it out to be. Wal-Mart, whose download store has been open all of a year and a couple of weeks is already shutting down, apparently abandoning the effort after its tech partner HP discontinued whatever technology it was running the thing. Bonus for (former) Wal-Mart Video Downloads though: according to the FAQ, all downloaded videos are users' to keep, and no one's bound to keep the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager on their machine anymore. Of course, it's still DRMed to hell, so short of stripping the copy protection, you'll only be able to play "your" purchased videos with the machine on which you bought it -- and nothing else.

[Via Reuters]

[Leonard Nimrod @ Dec 27th 2007 9:26PM]

Before anyone starts bashing Wal-Mart for not offering a way to strip the DRM remember that Wal-Mart is just the distributer here. They don't own the rights to the media and therefor can't simple offer such a solution without being violating federal law and being sued out their arse by the content owners.

[phrozunsun @ Dec 27th 2007 11:28PM]

...or, there's bittorrent.

see, this is one of the many reasons that people are turning to piracy: It's easier, more reliable, and will ALWAYS work. no pesky licensing schemes that prevent you from watching/listening to what you already paid for.

I'm not saying theft is right, but until they offer something as convenient and for a fair price, I'm sure it will keep going on.

[Elevator @ Dec 28th 2007 10:47PM]

"Piracy, the better choice. (tm)"

[quomen @ Dec 27th 2007 9:29PM]

At least I can still buy my favorite pair of undies at their stores!

[DT @ Dec 27th 2007 9:45PM]

And that last sentence right there, is a damned good reason to stick with iTunes for music/video purchases...imagine spending a year or more building up a library for hundreds of dollars, and being told that you can keep the files for all eternity, but you can ONLY USE IT ON THAT ONE MACHINE, forever! iTunes aint going nowhere.

[rob @ Dec 28th 2007 11:17AM]

it's the same thing with itunes. you only get so many additional downloads of things you purchased.

[R. Corrino @ Dec 28th 2007 12:32PM]

Did the people who bought their Videos from Wal-Mart but their undies from the Apple store? Or maybe they ordered Pizza from the Zune Marketplace.

This goes to show people, buy merchandise from companies whose core product is the item that you are buying. One stop shopping has its place but cutting edge technology isn't one of them.

Who wants to bet thet the SONY Connect store for e-books will fold and that the Amazon Kindle will at least make it several years......

[SteveMB @ Dec 27th 2007 11:20PM]

AllOfMp3 for the win! You pay a few cents for a song and it's DRM free! Apple charges $1.29 for DRM free songs. That's ridiculous.

[phrozunsun @ Dec 27th 2007 11:28PM]

clearly, you forgot about the whole NBC/iTunes fiasco where people now have half a drm'ed season.

[Derry Quinn @ Dec 27th 2007 11:28PM]

no they don't

[phrozunsun @ Dec 27th 2007 11:38PM]

read the second comment fanboy:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/02/nbc-content-gets-removed-from-itunes/

thanks.

and his comment is so ironic. any DRM is bad, iTunes will eventually be obsolete, so will the iPod. Locking the content to the device in a non-transcodable manner is the problem, not walmart.

[404error @ Dec 28th 2007 5:08AM]

Wow. Defensive much? He was referring to the cost of iTunes Plus tracks. They aren't $1.29 anymore. They're all $0.99 now, I think.

[LC @ Dec 28th 2007 5:25AM]

I thought this thread was about video and not music. iTunes video is still DRM'd and the point about iTunes and the half season of NBC shows is still valid.

[404error @ Dec 28th 2007 7:10AM]

I wasn't saying it was an invalid point. Just pointing out that calling Derry Quin a fanboy when it looks like he was just responding to SteveMB's reply was kind of silly.

[MosquitoControl @ Dec 28th 2007 8:46AM]

Call me when I can burn the iTunes video I download onto a DVD so I can watch it on my HDTV without having to purchase some extraneous Apple branded hardware. Or when I can watch it on an mp3 player again not branded Apple, as while iPods are nice and all, having an exremely cheap, extremely small one to kick around with is equally nice.

[PSM @ Dec 28th 2007 8:53AM]

iTunes is of course more stable, but I have cassette tapes from when I was 3 years old. In 50 years, I don't expect iTunes to be supported either. That's why I convert all my iTunes purchases to DRM-free now, so I can continue to convert them to whatever the current standard is for the rest of my life.

[Bryan Ledford @ Jan 1st 2008 6:04PM]

Rob, we're not talking about additional downloads here - as far as most of us are concerned, if you delete a file you don't necessarily need to be provided an opportunity to re-download the same file. What we're concerned with is the fact that once you've purchased a movie using the Walmart service, you can only view it using the computer you originally purchased the movie with.

[MacVicta @ Dec 27th 2007 9:51PM]

Right before video downloading explodes with the iTunes movie rental service.

Steve Jobs FTW.

[Jeff @ Dec 28th 2007 7:52AM]

It hasn't exploded with TV shows, what makes you think it's going to explode with movies?

Video downloading just isn't as big as music downloading, because the fact of the matter is most people still watch their video on a TV in their living room. And there is still no way to do that over the internet that's as easy as "turn on your cable box or DVD player, sit down and watch". And honestly, DRM is a big issue for those who *do* want to watch video elsewhere, because the iPod isn't nearly as popular in that arena (in fact, cheap divx-playing portable DVD players are probably a lot more popular for that purpose). So those who do download movies are likely to keep using illegal download sites or just ripping their own DVD's.

Music is different because, as Stevie J himself said so long ago, it can be a passive activity, so it lends itself better to portability and consumption in short bursts. But as the Wal-Mart shutdown and the NBC iTunes pullout show, nobody has been all that successful in video downloads yet. Nobody. Including Apple. And the Fox deal won't change that.

[The Grand Master @ Dec 27th 2007 10:16PM]

Am I the only one who didn't know it even existed?

[everrette powell @ Dec 28th 2007 8:14AM]

no your not, i was reading this and thinking i didn't know they did that.

[blinkcowz182 @ Dec 27th 2007 10:42PM]

Another reason to not put DRM on anything. I can put on a 40 year old vinyl record anytime and enjoy it. I'd imagine most of the companies that produced them have either gone out or merged with other companies but the record still works. Good luck finding a service still around in 40 years that will support the DRM.

[nikster @ Dec 27th 2007 11:17PM]

that's the main problem with DRM. It's supposed to make it so only you, the rightful owner, can watch stuff. That would be fine and well, except that current DRM schemes instead make it so only you can watch it on your machine as long as the software is supported.

iTunes is no different in this regard.

That's why I buy DRM free or not at all.

[Brent @ Dec 28th 2007 12:12AM]

I wonder if in 40 years there will be DRM stores like there are vinyl stores now. Someday all of us will be standing around over racks and racks of ipods saying, "Ahhh, back when music was pure."

[John @ Dec 28th 2007 12:23AM]

Why are you all acting like ANY of the same codecs, programs, computers, or even electrical standards are going to be around in 40 years? Much less your hard drives, which I doubt will even function properly at that point. Plus, all of your movies will probably be re-released onto some other format (probably not even digital) that you'll have to buy all over again.

[Taz @ Dec 28th 2007 1:33AM]

"Why are you all acting like ANY of the same codecs, programs, computers, or even electrical standards are going to be around in 40 years? Much less your hard drives, which I doubt will even function properly at that point. Plus, all of your movies will probably be re-released onto some other format (probably not even digital) that you'll have to buy all over again."

This may be true, however I know that as my equipment improves, and we move to quantum storage and new processor models and all that kind of crap -- I know that I have chosen to store my music in a form to which I have the full source code for compression and decompression (FLAC).
So - no matter how things develop, I will always be able to convert my music from it's current form into whatever comes next

[Wisam @ Dec 27th 2007 11:54PM]

Am I the only one who can see Wal-Mart video BETA ? and for more than a year and DRMed. Anyway, I never heard of such service to begin with

[Jeff @ Dec 28th 2007 8:11AM]

Yeah, "beta" as in "we'll finish it if the site gets enough traffic to justify it." Obviously, it didn't.

As for people not hearing of it, one of the big reasons Wal-Mart sold off their DVD rental business to Netflix was because they were getting into downloads. They, like everyone else, expected movie downloads to eclipse DVD rentals by mail pretty quickly. Didn't happen. Wal-Mart's now closing down their download service and meanwhile, Netflix is still adding about 500,000 new customers per quarter.

The conventional wisdom is way ahead of the American consumer when it comes to the ways they get their movies.

[Riley @ Dec 27th 2007 11:58PM]

I only heard of it because 300 came with a free downloadable version of it, which is dumb, because it's faster to just rip it, but i suppose they were just trying to promote their service
yeah, that worked

[Leroy Vargas @ Dec 28th 2007 12:21AM]

One clear reason why I'm still buying CDs and DVDs rather than downloading machine-locked DRM'd material: because I can play my CDs on any, ANY CD/DVD/Blu-ray player/drive and my DVDs on almost any, ANY DVD/Blu-ray player/drive out there. And as a plus, CDs preserve audio quality much better than those pesky 128-kbps MP3/AAC downloads because they use lossless 16-bit linear PCM encoding that only introduces minimal magnitude-quantization error. (DVD-Audio improves this by using up to 48-bit encoding, but so far unfortunately it hasn't achieved the same rate of success/adoption as CD-Audio.) And as another plus, DVD-Video has better video resolution (720×480 @ 30 fps for NTSC, 720×576 @ 25 fps for PAL) than those iTunes movie downloads, although its MPEG-2 video-compression scheme doesn't always produce the best video quality. (Here Blu-ray improves over DVD-Video: 1920×1080p @ cinematically-correct 24 fps and the option of either an improved version of MPEG-2 or the state-of-the-art MPEG-4 a.k.a. VC1 compression, although the latter requires faster CPUs as my Athlon x2 4200+ can't seem to handle it quite properly yet. Anyway my Dell 2405 LCD can't handle Blu-ray via DVI because of lack of HDCP.)

Anyway my point is clear: digital downloads still suck, DRM'd or not. Long live the physically-tangible optical formats! (CD, DVD, etc.)

[Skullfighter @ Dec 28th 2007 1:22AM]

Am I the only one who thought this guy was trying to sound smart with the whole:
"lossless 16-bit linear PCM encoding that only introduces minimal magnitude-quantization error"

I laughed when I got that far and decided to reply.

[John @ Dec 28th 2007 1:40AM]

yeah, I think that if you feel obligated to pull out the wikipedia article to look for acronyms to spout out and feel smart, you probably should go do something else. Also, thanks original poster, but I'm pretty certain everyone here already knew that CDs are higher quality than 128kbps AAC files.

[Leroy Vargas @ Dec 28th 2007 3:41PM]

I mean "lossless" in terms of frequency content. I noticed with a spectrum analyzer that most of my MP3/WMA rips at 128 kbps lack some high-frequency content present on factory-original CDs. Because I'm not that golden-eared (I can only distinguish audio up to 15 kHz, unfortunately), I can't judge by ear alone the quality of MP3/AAC/WMA vs CD-Audio, but properly-calibrated spectrum analyzers can tell the difference. How much I love audio engineering! That leaves magnitude quantization (something inevitable on the digital world) as the only source of errors for CD audio when converting from analog to digital audio.

Addendum to my DVD discussion: I can play DVDs on any, ANY DVD/Blu-ray player out there as long as their region codes match those of the players. Well, I have a region-free DVD player so this isn't an issue to me. However, I still need to see a region-free Blu-ray player...

[crypt @ Dec 29th 2007 7:29AM]

Correct me if Im wrong Leroy, but your argument regarding the superiority of CD's over mp3 seems a little pointless when you state that you cant tell the difference between the two.

"I can't judge by ear alone the quality of MP3/AAC/WMA vs CD-Audio, but properly-calibrated spectrum analyzers can tell the difference."

Im no audiophile, but last time I checked, irrespective of how the music is encoded, musical enjoyment comes from listening to it via my ears, not some spectrum analyzer that properly calibrated to identify things my ears cant pick up.

[Leroy Vargas @ Dec 29th 2007 12:46PM]

Probably you forgot that there are golden-eared people out there that can hear up to 20 kHz. Those people claim to distinguish quality between CD-Audio and 128-kbps MP3/AAC/WMA, when using the best-quality speakers and headphones (not earphones or any other cheapo speakers whose frequency response is quite limited).

[z3r0D @ Dec 31st 2007 12:11AM]

Then why are YOU still buying in CD form when YOU can't tell the difference?

You made it about YOURSELF, not about golden eared people.

[Leroy Vargas @ Jan 1st 2008 12:27PM]

Because with CD-Audio, I have the guarantee that the music still has its original recording quality. With lossy download formats I don't have that guarantee. And, suppose that your computer crashes and needs a full format; you'll possibly lose all your downloads, but I still have the original physical CDs, and I can rip from them as many times as I want (into a lossless format).

[Garrett @ Jan 2nd 2008 4:24AM]

did no one else pick up on how he called MP3s and AACs "lossless" when in fact the correct word is "lossy"? :)

[Leroy Vargas @ Jan 2nd 2008 8:42AM]

I never called MP3/AAC lossless. When I said "lossless 16-bit linear PCM encoding that only introduces minimal magnitude-quantization error", I was talking about CD-Audio, dude. Please read the full sentence before jumping to stupid conclusions.

"…CDs preserve audio quality much better than those pesky 128-kbps MP3/AAC downloads because they [the CDs, not the MP3/AAC files] use lossless 16-bit linear PCM encoding that only introduces minimal magnitude-quantization error. …"

Just in case you misunderstood my sentence.

[Fabrice @ Dec 28th 2007 1:32AM]

I dunno guys. I wonder if Movie Download will ever take off. I mean music is something else, What else is there to be added to a CD... SACD didn t work and i am not sure i want to hear anything in 5:1. This is something different with movies... HD quality is taking off. 5:1 is almost obsolete to the advantage of 7:1... and there are so many extras when u actually buy a DVD... On top of that , it looks good on my shelves. (CD ? not much...). The way i see it, Movie Download make sense for TV shows, or OnDemand where it s basically thee same experience as going to a theater.... Who would pay nearly as much as a spanking new DVD just to watch it on a PC screen...
Years from now, we ll find papers trying to explain why the Movie business is still in... business and the Music business is all but dead. The only thing i am afraid of is that TV shows are gonna go thru the same crisis as Anime today. They are short to download (even shorter without commercial) and without DRM, a spanking new episode of LOST will be available to everyone in the worlds the following morning making is useless for international media groups to pay huge money for something people have already seen.
Movie Download will never work. TV shows Download will take off and will destroy network TV.

[John @ Dec 28th 2007 1:44AM]

The problem network TV has is that none of the consumers directly pay for the product except with their time. And one of the huge parts of the digital age is convenience - my schedule, not theirs. We watch what we want, when we want, and that doesn't leave room for ads.

[theohner @ Dec 28th 2007 6:00AM]

I tend to agree with the comment about the (un)likely success of movie downloads. There is a short term issue of course with bandwidth. High definition compressed movies weigh in at gigabytes of size. In the UK certainly; our ISPs bash us with the fair use policy stick if you're using more than 40gb of bandwidth in a month.

[Fabrice @ Dec 28th 2007 6:34AM]

I think it is the case in the US too (cf Comcast playing around with file sharing system). But I don't believe it s the main issue to the future failure of movie download. In densely populated countries like Taiwan or Hong Kong, or even in France (where i come from), download speeds are so high ( 40 and even 70 gigs) that iTV is being offered as an alternative to cable and satellite TV. This is still unthinkable here (i would love to see how microsoft is going to do that with XBOX 360's iTV without buffering for long minutes.. and that s not even considering HD TV). Download time in the future will allow fast movie downloads. I still think the added value with extras and other goodies when you purchase a DVD is what will make the DVD or HD/Blue DVD a media that will not disappear anytime soon.
Purchasing a song today has no meaning whatsoever compared to the experience of actually going to BestBuy and buy a CD. The product itself has become a disposable format that people accumulate in their Ipods without thinking twice and then are all surprised when they realized they actually bought the song when their Ipod shuffles to it. There s a long way to go to reach that point with movies. We did reach it with Anime thou. and this is the reason for all those distribution companies filing for bankruptcy. Next stop TV shows.

[eX @ Dec 28th 2007 9:00AM]

Totally agree with you that it's more fun to go to a store to pick out a CD. I hate all the crap quality downloads and still go buy my music the traditional way. As for Anime, I can't agree more. But in this case it's not the convenience of digital downloads, because most rips are terrible quality. The problem is the distributors themselves who charge ridiculous amounts of money for it and yet the release quality is worse than that of originals from Japan and dubs are garbage 95% of the time. Seriously, average of $30 for a 2-3 episode disc is insane. Another thing is pretty much lack of trailers and such so people know what they're getting. No wonder people download the stuff online, most can't even afford to buy a full season of their favorite series w/t spending a week's worth of money. Corporate greed shall speak their undoing!

[Neal @ Dec 28th 2007 11:42AM]

I can't get any movies to play from these 8 tracks, can anyone help??

[coffee @ Dec 28th 2007 12:52PM]

I guess I'm the only one that actually tried out Walmart's download service?

I had to first install the Walmart downloader, which also installed the Walmart viewer (a bastardized Media Player). Which you had to use to view the movie, because other players weren't allowed.

I downloaded "Open Season" or whatever that animated Bear movie was called, and it did look good, sound good, and play well, and cost about 12 bucks.

Of course, I couldn't move it to any other computer or device, so my daughter ended up sitting at the computer, watching the movie. I guess I could hook the computer to the TV, but I wasn't in the mood.

That was the first, and last, movie I bought/downloaded from Walmart.

I think there's a future for movie downloading, but that wasn't it.

[Brent @ Dec 28th 2007 1:39PM]

Everything that is available on a DVD or CD COULD be available in digital download and at exactly the same quality. True, pirated movies and existing download services don't include them now, but anyone that doesn't understand that DVDs and CDs are nothing but a type of storage doesn't belong here. And if something is storage it can be downloaded. Sure, bandwidth is an issue, but barely. See http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/25/internet2-operators-set-new-internet-speed-record/ an article about a theoretical 100Gbps connection. When things like this become reality then we truly can all live 'in the cloud'.

[qatoknow @ Dec 28th 2007 5:24PM]

Finally, some responses with more foresight. Increasing bandwidth
speeds and technology will only help movie downloads more of a
reality. TV's with external or internal media servers will dish out
content accessible from any device, anywhere in the house, and
anywhere you can connect remotely from. Movie downloads will not be
stuck at the PC forever. But don't get me wrong. Movie downloads are
not for everybody. The very young kids (< 24) have/are already
ditching physical media for digital downloads. The older guys (yes,
25+) will be like the folks who still talk lovingly about vinyl or
going to Best Buy for the experience (what?!). And your DVD
collection won't look so good cluttered and collecting dust on your
shelf when everybody has sleek TV's serving out digital content.
Plus, there's also digital rentals that online stores like iTunes are
soon providing at reasonable prices. Don't tell me you prefer to go
to Blockbuster. Last time I checked, video stores were struggling.
Blockbuster had to start a mail-rental program and buy up Movielink. Movie downloads are coming up. It may take 10 years or so for physical media to finally die, but it has already begun.

[Leroy Vargas @ Dec 29th 2007 1:07PM]

I doubt this will ever happen. The moment superfast internet connections (512 Mbps?) become affordable to almost everybody and digital downloads achieve the same quality/resolution as Blu-ray/HD-DVD, the movie industry would've certainly migrated to a much-higher-resolution, much-better-quality video format: 6720×2880p pixels (cinematographically-correct 2.33:1 aspect ratio, more than 9 times 1080p HDTV resolution!) @ 48 fps (twice the industry-standard framerate; equal to IMAX?), 48-bit super-true-color (twice the 24-bit true-color scheme used by MPEG-2 and VC1), MPEG-7 compression...

[Leroy Vargas @ Dec 29th 2007 1:36PM]

..., monster 10.2-channel 48-bit uncompressed audio super-sampled at 384 kHz...

The physical media will always be way ahead of digital downloads