Wal-Mart to sell video downloads: reports
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and  Hewlett-Packard Co. are set to announce a deal with several  major Hollywood studios that would allow the retailer to sell  digital movies and television shows on its Web site, according  to media reports on Tuesday.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Friday  denied it was not trying to dissuade movie studios from working  with other forms of distribution, such as Apple Computer Inc.'s  iTunes download service.
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Wal-Mart will introduce a partnership with all of the six major Hollywood studios â to sell digital movies and television shows on its Web site.
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Blog: Move follows company's previous announcement that Wal-Mart will sell its desktops.
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NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES  - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Tuesday introduced a test version of its new video download service, making it the first major retailer to offer such a service with the backing of all of Hollywood's big studios.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. , the world's largest retailer, said on Tuesday that it has seen strong results from its service that allows customers to order products on its Web site and have them shipped to a local Wal-Mart store for free.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT.N  on  Monday said it expected sales at its U.S. stores open at least  a year to be in the middle of a previously forecast rise of  between 1 and 3 percent in December, the key shopping month.
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SAN FRANCISCO/ BOSTON  - Dell Inc.  said on Thursday it plans to start selling personal computers through Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  in North America next month, breaking from a 23-year model of direct sales as it tries to rekindle business.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc.,  already the nation's top seller of DVDs, said Tuesday that it  has become the first major retailer to offer a digital download  service that will feature movies from all the major studios.
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Britain&#39;s Woolworths Group Plc   said on Friday it was to supply U.S. Wal-Mart Stores Inc&#39;s   British supermarket chain Asda with CDs, video games,  and selected elements of Asda&#39;s DVD range.
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NEW YORK - Hollywood's love affair with DVDs will face its biggest test beginning Tuesday as Wal-Mart unveils a movie and TV-show download service with participation by all major studios. New releases will be available at    www.walmart.com/videodownloads on the same day they come out on DVD and will cost up to $19.88. Older films will go for up to $9.88. TV episodes will be $1.96 the day after they air. Networks on board include Fox, CW and Viacom's MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Logo and VH1.
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(InfoWorld) - Sony plans to launch an online video download service next year, according to reports in both the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal newspapers. The service has been developed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and will allow users to download movies via a computer and store them on MemoryStick memory cards for viewing on the PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld games device, said the Financial Times. Amazon.com and existing movie download sites like Movielink and CinemaNow are in talks with Sony to use the service, which will launch in the first quarter of 2007, the newspaper reported in its online edition. Sony is also working on a service that would allow downloads directly to the PSP, said The Wall Street Journal's online edition. Spokespersons for both Sony and Sony Computer Entertainment in Tokyo deferred requests for comment to the company's U.S. offices, which were closed. Sony has already tried to expand the PlayStation Portable's uses beyond gaming to movies. It began offering movies on the small discs used by the PSP but sales have been low and the movies never caught on among many users. The PlayStation Portable was launched in late 2004 and initially enjoyed strong sales. By the end of March 2005 shipments had reached 3 million units and jumped to over 14 million units in the year from April 2005. But things soon started going wrong for the new device and sales began dropping. In the current year, from April 2006 to March 2007, Sony initially expected sales to drop to 12 million units but in October revised its forecast to 9 million units. The successful launch of a movie download service could help flagging sales of PSP hardware and give Sony something to begin to challenge Apple Computer's iTunes Store, where iPod owners can download video clips, TV shows and some movies. Sony doesn't offer a video version of its Walkman music player leaving it unable to compete with Apple on the video front.
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Apple Computer Inc. said  it will begin selling movie downloads from Walt Disney Co.'s film
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  is  considering acquisitions in its home market as it seeks to open  smaller stores and limit its reliance on giant supercenters for  growth, the Financial Times reported in its online edition.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. sold advertising to two men who allegedly marketed an application designed to find and download pirated movies online, a business relationship that has angered big movie and TV studios, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The extent of Google's involvement with this allegedly rogue operation has been detailed in sworn depositions taken as part of an ongoing civil lawsuit major Hollywood studios filed against these two men in October 2005. The defendants said under oath that Google assigned them account representatives who assisted them with their Google ad campaigns, including offering them credit and suggesting they use keywords like "bootleg movie download" and "pirated" to promote their Web sites, the Journal reported. A Google employee "largely" backed up the statements from defendants Brandon Drury and Luke Sample, both residents of Missouri, the Journal reported, quoting anonymous sources familiar with the case, in which some depositions have been sealed. EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com generated US$1.1 million in revenue between 2003 and 2005, and Google received $809,000 for advertising, the Journal reported. Upon learning that the defendants used Google to market their software, the plaintiffs, which include News Corp., Viacom International Inc., Sony Corp., NBC Universal, Time Warner Inc. and The Walt Disney Co., complained to the search engine company, according to the Journal. Google responded by holding a conference call with the media companies on Friday in which it pledged to remove certain ads the companies object to, create a list of approved advertisers and stop selling keywords meant to drive traffic to pirated material, the Journal reported. Google also committed to monitor keywords more closely and to train its ad sales team on avoiding selling those types of ads. The flap comes at a time when Google is trying to negotiate with large media companies over the use of their material on YouTube's video uploading and sharing site, which Google acquired last year for $1.65 billion. Those negotiations are proving tough, as evidenced by fiascoes like this month's decision by Viacom to demand that Google remove over 100,000 of its video clips from YouTube. Viacom, whose properties include MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, gave up afterÂ months of negotiations, saying Google and YouTube proved "unwilling to come to a fair market agreement." EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com, which are no longer operational, didn't host any movies. Instead, they sold an application for $29.95 designed to allegedly help users search for and download pirated movies from P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing networks. The defendants dispute the allegations that they induced and facilitated piracy and are thus guilty of copyright infringement and unfair competition. Asked to comment about the Journal's report, a Google spokesman said via e-mail that Google forbids advertisers from using its ad platform to promote the sale of copyright infringing materials. "We are continually improving our systems to screen out ads that violate these policies," he wrote. Â
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has closed an online movie download service it launched less than a year ago.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  said on  Thursday it will charge less than $700 for two multimedia  desktop personal computer bundles from PC maker Dell Inc.   that it plans to start selling next month.