“Worried about its massive DVD sales, retail behemoth Wal-Mart has told some of Hollywood’s biggest players it will retaliate against them for selling movies on Apple’s iTunes,” Tim Arango reports for The NY Post.
“Last year when Disney announced it would begin offering episodes of the hit shows ‘Lost’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’ on Apple’s iTunes, the reaction of the world’s largest retailer sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry,” Arango reports.
“Wal-Mart, worried that offering the shows for viewing on iPods would cut into DVD sales at its stores, sent ‘cases and cases’ of DVDs back to Disney, according to a source familiar with the matter,” Arango reports. “Now, following Apple’s entrance in to the business of selling full-length films for download, the battle between Hollywood and its largest client is getting uglier, as studio executives say Wal-Mart has overtly threatened to retaliate if they go into business with Apple.”
“The last thing studios want to do before the holiday shopping season is to offend their biggest sales outlet; the studios, collectively, rely on Wal-Mart for some $5 billion of DVD sales in the fourth quarter,” Arango reports.
“But several weeks ago, in the midst of rumors that Apple was close to announcing a deal with Disney, Wal-Mart’s David Porter – the executive responsible for stocking the retailer’s shelves with DVDs and CDs and whose influence is so immense in Tinseltown that he’s been named to Premiere magazine’s annual power list – made the rounds of Hollywood studios,” Arango reports. “His message, according to a studio exec involved in the discussions: that there would be ‘serious ramifications’ if the studios hopped in bed with Apple.”
“‘They threatened to hurt us in terms of buying less products,’ said this person. The situation between Bentonville and Hollywood has gotten so heated and so high-level that Jobs recently phoned Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott to ask him to moderate his stance, according to a source,” Arango reports.
Full article here.
Even a low-class anticompetitive cancer like Wal-Mart won’t be able to hold back the future. Wal-Mart logic: we can undercut every business in every town in the world, but you can’t do it to us. If you agree with that logic, by all means shop at Wal-Mart.
WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price: http://www.walmartmovie.com/
Related articles:
Wal-Mart: we’re not fighting iTunes Store movie downloads – September 23, 2006
Wal-Mart not happy with looming threat of Apple iTunes movie downloads – August 31, 2006
Wal-Mart loses ‘philosophical argument’ with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, gains top-selling iPod – November 29, 2005
republicans?
So Wal-Mart wasn’t evil during the Clinton years?
fascinating how much those mystical republicans are responsible for…
When the iTMS opens up movies to the rest of the world next year the sales will be largely to countries where WalMart doesn’t have a majority marketing power.
Here in far west Asia (the UK) we have ASDA, but it is in no way dominant. Walmart is non-existent in Australia; I am unsure of Japan and Europe.
Once the OS sales start to match the US sales, dollar signs will appear on Hollywood executive’s eyes, and in Hollywood money talks.
Interesting that the threats started whem Apple got into the game, but Wal-Mart did nothing when Amazon started their service.
This speaks volumes about what business thinks of the potential of the Apple model vs. the Amazon model.
“f consumers want lower prices at Walmart so be it. But if they want fruitstand guy and higher prices, so be it. The market will decide.
As for me, Walmart helps me keep my hard earned money in my pockets. It helps me save money, or use it on my family, or my children in other ways.”
What you don’t understand is a half of Waldevil’s employees depend on taxpayer financed healthcare- medicaide- which costs the taxpayer billions. So while you save money at the store, you pay more in medicaide tax. Meanwhile, Wallmart develops factories in China, so American factory workers will endup working at wallmart. That’s the high cost of low prices. So, the US looses it’s industrial base atan xlr8t’d rate and China surplants us as the #1 superpower thanks to wallmart. In Washington, the #1 supporter of Wallmart is your local commie loving whore Republican Congressman who cannot pull himself off the teet of lobiest dollars.
hey if this is true, the how about if Apple Features that Documentary on Wal-Mart on it’s front page of iTunes.
Walmart used to sell American goods. They used to have a business sense and principles that stood for good and helped Americans.
Somewhere along the way the whole damn thing turned evil and corrupt, probably in a bid to become bigger and bigger with better and better stock-share pricing.
Now they’re just another corporation, trying to push people under to push themselves up.
DON’T SHOP AT WALMART!
What a liberal take on Wal Mart, MDN. I’m proud of ya.
This story is bogus. Wal-Mart will simply create it’s own
movie download business.
We’ve seen the numbers of music downloads on iTunes and on average the claim goes is 20 songs per ipod have been downloaded from itunes.
That will easily be less for movies. Why would they cry over movies and not DVD TV show collections. They are just as popular as DVD movie sales.
If Wal-Mart is that worried they shouldn’t be. Digital movies won’t won’t outsell DVD’s since quality is low and it restricted to the computer.
Plus Zune-Mart is coming soon. MS and WM have a common enemy in apple. Look for big promotions
of Zune per MS pressure and incentives.
MDN word “play” -come on boys and play fair.
Typical WalMart.
When I was in business school, one of my classmates woarked for a company that makes the leading brand of crayons (begins with a C, ends with “ola”)
They got called in for a very angry meeting when Walmart determined that the compay had given Target the same pricing Walmart was getting (Walmart insists that they get a better price than anyone else).
The company was told that it didn’t matter that they were the leading brand. WalMart would pull their products from the shelf and replace them with crayons from China, and people would buy them because “Walmart is the only store in most markets”, so people have to buy what’s there.
The problem is that WalMart is so big, manufacturers have no choice but to whore themselves out to them and do what their told. I think that Walmart accouts for something like 20% of sales for Proctor and Gamble today.
As a European I think it’s incredible to read these posts.
Whether a US American is politically left, right or centre, he still considers the worst and most abusive word he can call his political opponent is ‘commie’.
And all this just a short 50 years after McCarthyism – the most disgraceful period of American history.
Haven’t you guys learned anything from history?
In Europe, if we want to abuse our political opponents, we call them ‘fascists’
Now that’s more like it!
But in a country where 73% of the population believe that the earth is 6000 years old, who can expect anything else?
Wal-Mart evil? I dunno about that, but they’ve done their damn best to destroy LOCAL businesses and land all over the country.
I’ve walked through Wal-Marts and seen all the bloated po’ folk buying cheap goods produced by even poorer folk… at pitful wages. Gee, what a concept; exploit the destitute to serve the poor! Bravo Wal-Mart!
Aside from their getting huge tax breaks from local politicians, ALL Wal-Mart profits end up somewhere else, NONE of it goes back into the local economies they’ve done their best to infect.
Personally, I support local businesses over national chain stores.
I have NEVER spent a cent at Wal-Mart and NEVER will.
FUCK Wal-Mart.
ALL the studios should band together and pull their movies from WM’s shelves, a preemptive strike if you will. How sweet it’d be, just in time for the holidays.
No retailer, not even WM, should be able to tell studios where they can & cannot sell their works.
Heh if WM had any sense they’d team up with iTunes! Like MDN said you can’t stop the future. WM is in immediate danger of becoming a dinosaur: big, terrifying, and extinct, killed off by sudden climatic change.
Even WM knows the game of business is either evolve or die. Where would WM’s music business be today if Sam Walton had fiercely held onto 8-tracks? You get the idea.
ALL the studios should band together and pull their movies from WM’s shelves, a preemptive strike if you will. How sweet it’d be, just in time for the holidays
Umm, in case you haven’t heard… The Hollywood studios (apart from Disney) are not to thrilled about Apple gaining traction in the download market either… It’s not just Wal-Mart..
Apple is up against a double-whammy
Look,
Just FUCK Walmart
Walmart is so big it has monopoly power on the buying side, throwing its weight around anyplace, anywhere.
It is the Microsoft of retail, only worse, because it is so much larger.
Here’s how big it is (from a Fast Company article in 2003):
Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company–bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger COMBINED. “Clearly,” says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University’s J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, “Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been.” It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.
Wal-Mart reminds me of a certain software company.
Never ceases to amaze me, one silly surface look at an issue or story and everyone with rare exceptions goes off the deep end.
Walmart saves millions of people money everyday, which gives the average consumer more buying power, and somehow that is evil? Give me a break.
The Post and much of the media today is so biased, you cannot read any of their stories at face value. The story is usually between the lines somewhere. The documentary doesn’t offer any counterpoints or balance.. what a useless piece of film..
MDN likes hits and hot topics like this, but posting that useless anti-walmart ad was too much…
A close friend of mine is one of the largest wholesalers to Wal-mart and the Post article is pretty much business as usual for them. They are known to be bullies on a whole different level when it comes to purchasing from distributors and wholesalers, so regardless of what Wal-mart is publicly stating, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true. There is a lot of money at stake for both sides.
DVDs are obsolete. Blueray is the future.
This may have been said already but I would never by any media from Wal*Mart. They dumb it down to appease the Christian reich. And anything truly interesting won’t be found there anyhow. You have to go to the the loocal shops.
This is why I believe Apple to should be more open to partnerships with other corporations. Imagine if Apple partnered with Wal-mart, Target, Amazon and Tower-records to offer a version of the iTunes music store thru their websites… windows media player would instantly become usless and obsolete. iTunes and Quick Time would instantly become the global standard for music and video…. just a thought.
Where do we live again ? Do we only have one store in the entire country ?
Add this to my list of reasons for not shopping at Whore-Mart
PRESIDENT BUSH: I fully understand, however, that there will be a Russian-style democracy. I don’t expect Russia to look like the United States. As Vladimir pointedly reminded me last night, we have a different history, different traditions. And I will let him describe to you his way forward, but he shared with me some very interesting thoughts that I think would surprise some of our citizens. Now that I’ve lured you into the deal here, you know — like, for example, how do you promote land reform. So we discussed land reform. You know, one of the interesting decisions a government has to make, particularly this government would have to make, is how do you encourage private ownership of land further than that which has already happened. Anyway, he shared some thoughts with me. Sorry to put — lay the trap out there for you — but it was a good discussion. He’s a strong man. Look, he’s willing to listen, but he also explains to me, he doesn’t want anybody telling him how to run his government. He was elected. And so it was a cordial relationship. But he can speak for himself.
PRESIDENT PUTIN: We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly. [Massive laughter erupts]
DUBYA: Just wait.
WHAT A DUMMY!!!!
Who’s the douchebag in this thread that said “Clinton lacks vision”?
Are you stupid?
Good God- just check this out….
REPORTER: What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and state governments?
DUBYA: Yeah — tribal sovereignty means that, it’s sovereign. It’s — you’re a — you’re a — you’ve been given sovereignty, and you’re — viewed as a sovereign entity. [Laughter emanates from the audience]
REPORTER: Okay.
DUBYA: And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between — sovereign entities.
— Well that clears up the relationship perfectly, Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004
BHWAAAAA HAAAAA HHAAAAAAA!
For an even bigger laugh, check the audio out (caveat: at once, funny…..yet embarassing).
http://dubyaspeak.com/policymaker.phtml?year=2004
(halfway down the page).