Walmart kills movie downloads

Walmart has killed its movie download business, which is not even a year old. There were many problems with it:

  • It was not compatible with video-capable iPods.
  • It was over-priced.
  • It had a lot of clumsy DRM (Digital Rights Management) attached to the movies.

A more general problem with movie downloads is that they are still very slow, compared to things like songs, which download pretty quickly even over a DSL line. The movie download services, including the movies offered on iTunes, have to reduce the quality to speed up the download or force buyers to wait hours to download a high quality version.

DVDs still are very competitive because we do not have fast broadband connections and because the studios are still attaching too much DRM to movies.

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