Wal-Mart has Joined the Movie Downloading Companies

What buyers will get out of the new introduction might not be that much, although there is some price gain, for example, it is possible to download films from Apple between $12.99 and $14.99 depending when the film is ordered, whereas Wal-Mart will start a little lower at $12.88 but goes up as far as $19.88. The other downside with Apple film downloading system is the film it carries are only from two studios, Walt Disney and Viacom, however, Wal-Mart covers more studios for the close 3000 films that it is making available for download, yet it will not avail movies from ABC, CBC, and NBC. At the same time older movies would start from $7.50 at Wal-Mart whereas iTunes charges $9.99. The studios are favoring the pricing method Wal-Mart is using which they call variable pricing compared to the fixed pricing of Apple. If there are more downsides with what Wal-Mart will be offering, it does not rent films online. It is possible to play the movies on a PC or it can be transferred to portable media players that are compatible with Windows Media, and the movies cannot be played on iPods. Similarly, movies bought from Wal-Mart cannot be burned onto DVDs currently, but that could change in the future. All in all, it will enable it to get a good bite out of the annual revenue that is estimated to make it to $4 billion in five years. However, the DVD rental and sales already generates an estimated $27 billion annually.