It always irks us when we hear that a big lumbering retail giant has launched or acquired a service for delivering online video. Well Walmart has gone and done it again, this time picking up 30 month old Vudu to deliver streaming TV services directly to Blu-ray players and internet TVs.
Vudu has just adopted the approach of putting its software platform into the chips that are found in many top end flat TV screens, to offer internet connectivity and access to its library of services. Just last week it signed up Zoran, one of the leading video chip suppliers to the TV industry, to add Vudu to its chipset.
What Walmart is trying to do it lay down a standard for bypassing cable and other pay TV services with a range of online video, mostly films, as well as a series of social networking applications that put Facebook and others on your TV set. By dictating this architecture to its suppliers, Walmart hopes that it will be able to control the drift away from buying DVDs, in which it is fairly dominant in the US, alongside Amazon, and ride the transition to online HD movie delivery. But Walmart has so many other eggs to fry we just expect it to fumble this ball and to waste whatever money it has spent on Vudu.
Widget platforms on TV sets became fairly standard at CES this year and services from Netflix, CinemaNow, Blockbuster, Pandora, Flickr, Amazon’s VOD and Picasa found top-billing there. Vudu for the first time this year abandoned the idea of its own set-top boxes and cut deals with HDTVs and blu-ray players from Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Sharp and were reported cutting new deals with Samsung and Vizio.
VUDU says it has licensing agreements with almost every major movie studio and dozens of independent and international distributors and offers 16,000 movies, including the largest 1080p VoD.
The acquisition should close in weeks and neither company disclosed the financial terms of the agreement. We heard that Vudu was in financial difficulties and up for sale in mid-January and upon hearing that Walmart was in the running, strongly advised against it. We think it is only a matter of time before the Vudu team leaves and other services still run by entrepreneurs overtake Vudu, and it is forgotten.