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Having to contend with a pair of eight hundred pound gorillas when you’re used to being said gorilla can be quite humbling, especially if your name is Walmart. Last week, Walmart quietly shut down it’s movie download service before it even got out of “beta.” Users who have already bought movies to download will be able to continue viewing them for the time being.

Being that WalMart is the largest seller of DVDs and single handedly put the final nail in the VHS coffin, this is the second time Walmart has called it quits with with movies offered online – having bailed out of the online DVD rental service back in 2005. And although WalMart has said in the past that they would quit any business they couldn’t dominate, the decision to shut down their movie download service is blamed more on subcontractor issues, rather than a lack of market share. Hewlett-Packard, the company which runs the service for WalMart has decided it’s more trouble than it’s worth and rather than find another company to run the service, WalMart apparently agreed with them.

But let’s face it, with a service that had such draconian digital rights management as WalMart’s (users couldn’t play the movies on iPods or even burned for standard DVD players), a fairly limited selection, and facing the the true eight hundred pound gorillas – iTunes and Amazon, the service was doomed from the beginning.

Source: The Gray Old Lady

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