Wal-Mart Rolls End Credits On Movie Downloads

The movie download experiment by Wal-Mart ended before Christmas, with few people noticing the service’s departure.

Wal-Mart isn’t having much luck with this e-commerce thing when it comes to movies. First their DVD rental service got its digital butt kicked by Netflix. Now its movie download service has met a similar, and apparently unlamented, fate.

A Reuters report cited a shutdown of the technology behind the downloads as the reason for shuttering the service. Hewlett-Packard’s spokeperson said in the report the market for the download service did not perform as expected.

People who have movies downloaded from Wal-Mart can still watch them, but only on the computer that performed the download. Wal-Mart does not have plans to resurrect the service.

Wal-Mart’s movie downloads did not offer a better experience than picking up a physical DVD at one of its many stores. Their pricing was not competitive with the physical product, and limitations on what could be done with the movie as compared with a disc could not overcome the convenience factor of downloading.