Posted by brindils in Gadget News | 1 Comment
Vudu Online Movie Service Acquired By Walmart
Three years ago, Wal-Mart partnered with Hewlett-Packard to offer downloads of movies and TV shows. This company is retained within 10 months. Now that streaming video has become more widely accepted, Walmart seems to be taking advantage of what the market share Vudu has to go back in the game.
For Vudu, selling out couldn’t come at a much better time: they’ve never been profitable, although they’ve been gaining some traction by having their players embedded in growing numbers of TVs. Being owned by the world’s largest retailer will help them develop on that momentum. It also gives consumer electronics makers even a lot more incentive to preload their sets with Vudu, since Walmart will be a lot more inclined to sell products that incorporate a property that it owns.
At the CES expo earlier this year, Vudu announced many new hardware partners and a new app service. It is going to be interesting to see how Walmart will leverage Vudu inside their customer electronic items from various manufacturers. The retailer has exclusive products made for them from companies like Sony; it makes sense they will add the Vudu app to the exclusive items at a lower price point than the competition. Walmart has been focusing on electronics each aggressively for the past few years, so they do have the capability to make a huge play into the video streaming market.
By integrating Vudu software into Blu-ray players, Internet-connected HDTVs, and other media-streaming devices it sells at retail, Wal-Mart has an superb chance to turn out to be a major player within the on the internet movie market. (About 50 devices currently support Netflix, and that number could double by year’s end). I suspect Wal-Mart will match or surpass Netflix’s $9-a-month subscription plan, which permits subscribers to watch all the on the internet movies and TV shows they want every month–and rent a single DVD at a time.
But what about for consumers? Actually, it could end up getting a win there, as well. Nobody’s more effective at driving down prices than the big box retailer, and giving Vudu a lot more visibility and market share should lead to some healthy cost competition.
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